Teenagers favour bouts of irregular
heavy drinking episodes, only drinking once or twice a week, but as we grow
older we shift into a regular drinking pattern. A substantial proportion of
older men, drink daily or most days of the week, while a majority of women tend to drink monthly or on
special occasions.
In the UK, the majority of the adult
population consume alcohol and the harm associated with alcohol affects all society.
Lead author Dr Annie Britton (UCL Epidemiology & Public Health) said: “Understanding
how drinking behaviour fluctuates throughout life is important to identify high
risk groups and trends over time. Research
on the health consequences of alcohol needs to incorporate changes in drinking
behaviour over the life course. The current evidence base lacks this
consideration. Failure to include such dynamics in alcohol is likely to
lead to incorrect risk estimates.”
This is the first attempt to harmonise
data on drinking behaviour from a wide range of population groups over their lifespan
with repeated individual measures of consumption. The findings show how
drinking behaviour changes over our lifetimes, from adolescence through to old
age, and could be used to design public health initiatives and sensible
drinking advice.
The researchers looked at both the average
amount of alcohol consumed per week and the frequency of drinking. The findings
were based on over 174,000 alcohol observations collected over a 34 year
period, spanning from 1979 to 2013, from participants born in different eras,.
Drinking
patterns change more for men than for women, but both follow a similar pattern,
a rapid increase in alcohol intake during
adolescence leading to a peak in early adulthood, followed by a plateau in
mid-life, and then a decline into older ages.
For men, mean consumption of alcohol
rose sharply during adolescence, peaked at around 25 years at 20 units (160g) per
week, roughly the equivalent of drinking 10 pints of beer. This declined and plateaued during mid-life, before dropping to
5-10 units, approximately 3-5 pints of beer per week, from around 60 years.
Women followed a similar pattern, but reached a lower peak of around 7-8 units
per week, around 4 pints of beer.
Previous
studies linking alcohol consumption with associated harm typically used just
one measure of alcohol intake. Dr Britton said: “We have shown that people
change the way they consume alcohol as they age, and as such, studies reliant
on a single measure of alcohol intake are likely to be biased. It is essential
that the dynamic nature of exposure to alcohol over the life span is incorporated
into the estimates of harm.”