Delayed introduction to alcohol may lower the risk of later problems. Also, save it for those who need it.
Being the Yuletide month, it’s time for the medical press to pump out an Advent calendar of wowserish stories about the dangers of alcohol.
Your Back Page correspondent is quite fond of a cold one, and doesn’t appreciate the entirely justified warnings about the havoc alcohol can cause.
However. While we can’t say we waited all of 18 years before trying our first beer, we had a massive double-take, is-that-a-typo moment when we read that in the UK, the legal drinking age in the home is five years old.
If you’ve ever met a five-year-old, it’s likely your first thought wasn’t: Old sobersides there could really do with a drink or two to loosen up.
Our alarm is shared by the author of a viewpoint in the BMJ who gently argues that the legal age should be lifted, given evidence that delaying a person’s first experience of alcohol might lower their risk of becoming a problem drinker in later life.
Initiating alcohol in childhood or adolescence “may sensitise the neurocircuitry of addiction by inducing neuroadaptations in brain regions involved in reward and addiction”, Dr Aric Sigman writes, citing preclinical research, while research in adolescent mice has found that just a single-dose exposure to ethanol mice “causes acute and lasting neuronal changes in the brain … [and] induces plastic changes which in turn could contribute to the basis of ethanol dependence”.
A cavalcade of further depressing evidence follows.
Dr Sigman recommends “dispelling the French drinking myth”, under which giving wine to children at the dinner table is thought to prevent problematic alcohol habits forming, in supposed contrast to the British way of doing things.
In fact, to our considerable surprise, “WHO reported that alcohol consumption per person is higher, years of life lost is higher and alcohol-attributable fractions in overall mortality are 26% higher in France than in the UK”.
Dr Sigman notes that British schoolkids as young as nine are fed misleading and biased information that presents alcohol as benign and normal. Why? Because the materials are “funded by the alcohol industry through their charities, youth education projects and education trusts”.
In Australia the legal drinking age is 18 regardless of the location, which makes us sound quite unproblematic by comparison.
If you see something that makes you a bit giddy, pass it over to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
