Teenagers who drink regularly or binge drink occasionally often continue the harmful habit into their 30s, new research reports.

U.S. investigators found that teenagers who binge drink are more than twice as likely to do so in their 30s, compared with people who didn’t binge drink in their teen years.

Moreover, men who drank at least four drinks each day as teenagers were more likely to continue that habit into their 30s than men who drank less regularly as teenagers, the authors report in the journal Pediatrics.

These findings suggest that heavy drinking and binge drinking “are not behaviors that youths necessarily outgrow,” write Dr. Carolyn A. McCarty and her colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle.

McCarty told Reuters Health that policymakers should work to provide youth and college-aged heavy and binge drinkers with access to treatment, “to prevent long term habit formation and addiction.”

Previous research has shown that people typically start drinking alcohol as teenagers, and half down their first drink at or before age 15. Heavy and binge drinking during adolescence has been linked to a host of risks, including injury, dating violence and sexually transmitted diseases.

McCarty added that long-term problem drinking has been associated with a number of physical and psychological problems, including injuries, liver disease and cancer. She and her colleagues estimate that, in 2000 alone, almost 64,000 deaths were the direct result of harmful drinking habits.

To investigate whether drinking problems that develop in adolescence continue into adulthood, the researchers reviewed information about drinking habits collected from nearly 4,000 people when they were both teenagers and adults.

McCarty and her team found that, as teenagers, 12 percent of men and 9 percent of women were considered to be heavy drinkers, defined as having more than 4 drinks per day for men and 2 drinks per day for women. Male teens were almost 3 times as likely as lighter drinkers to continue to drink heavily into their early 30s.

In terms of binge drinking, defined as downing 6 or more drinks on one occasion in the past month, nearly three-quarters of men and half of women confessed to the habit during their teen years, and young binge drinkers were between 2 and 3 times as likely to still binge drink in their 30s.

McCarty said that teenagers who learn to use alcohol to cope with stress, or as a means to have a good time, may allow drinking to become “entrenched” in their lives.

She added that other harmful behaviors, such as smoking and violence, can also originate in adolescence.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, September 2004.