Association between adolescent alcohol use and neurocognitive function in young adulthood
Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Purpose: Studies on adolescent alcohol use and cognition are often unable to separate the potential causal effects of alcohol use on neurocognition from shared etiological influences, including genetic influences or other substance use comorbidities, such as nicotine use. The present study aims to clarify the relationship between adolescent alcohol use and young adult neurocognition by taking into account shared familial influences. Methods: Participants were 812 individuals (58.62% female, 361 complete pairs, 146 MZ pairs) from the longitudinal FinnTwin12 study. Frequency of alcohol use and frequency of intoxication were averaged across ages 14 and 17. Neurocognitive outcomes were measured in young adulthood (Mage=22) and included Trail Making Test, California Stroop test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence subtests (Vocabulary, Block design, Digit symbol), Digit Span subtest of Wechsler Memory Scale, Mental Rotation Test, Object Location Memory test. Covariates included sex, parental education, a measure of adolescent cognitive ability, current alcohol and nicotine use. We investigated the relationship between alcohol use and neurocognition using the co-twin comparison design, which controls for genetic and environmental influences shared by co-twins. Individual level models as well as co-twin comparisons conducted within the full sample and in monozygotic twin pairs (MZ) were run to provide successively stricter control for potential confounders.Results: Frequency of alcohol use across adolescence was associated with lower Vocabulary scores in the MZ/DZ co-twin control (beta=-0.12, 95% CI=-0.013,-0.234) and MZ only co-twin control models (beta=-0.305, 95% CI=-0.087,-0.523). Frequency of intoxication across adolescence was also associated with decreased Vocabulary scores in the MZ only co-twin analyses (beta=-0.301, 95% CI=-0.074,-0.528). Associations between adolescent alcohol use (frequency or intoxication) and all other neurocognitive measures were not statistically significant (ps<0.05).Conclusions: Higher adolescent alcohol use predicted lower young adult verbal ability, which required the retrieval of acquired knowledge. There was little evidence for adolescent alcohol use as a predictor of any other domains of neurocognition in this study, which required active processing of novel stimuli. These findings contrasted previous research that suggested sustained alcohol use has the greatest impact on measures of fluid intelligence in adulthood. The current findings, which require replication, indicated adolescent alcohol use may have the greatest impact on developing crystalized intelligence in young adulthood.
Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4392109693