The after-effects of alcohol
Under-age drinkers have more blackouts, suffer more accidents, demonstrate more anti-social behaviour and generally do less well in school than people who abstain until the age of 18. The reason: brain damage caused by alcohol.
The adolescent brain is still developing, which makes it particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of alcohol.
"Exposure to alcohol could be influencing the way the brain's architecture is being formed and once it's laid down, it's laid down for life," says Bobby Smyth, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Trinity College Dublin. "People under the age of 18 should not drink. They are going to live a long time, they have another 62 years after the age of 18 to drink. So hold off."
Irish teenagers have the highest rate of binge-drinking in Europe. One in three Irish 15-year-olds has been drunk at least twice, according to a 2002 HBSC survey. And one in four 15- and 16-year-olds told a 2003 ESPAD study that they been drunk three times or more in the last 30 days.
The neurological damage caused by alcohol means that many teenagers cannot develop the life skills required to avoid trouble in adulthood, according to a review of 140 clinical studies by researchers at Yale School of Medicine. Blunted emotional reactions, caused by alcohol damage to the frontal lobes, also make teen drinkers more prone to anti-social behaviour because they cannot take into account the consequences of their actions. Learning also becomes more difficult because alcohol subtly influences brain structure, impairing problem-solving and verbal abilities, working memory and visual-spatial skills.
The longer heavy drinking continues, the more damage is done, because the brain is unable to compensate for the disruption caused by alcohol.