Researchers Find High School IQ Predicts Drinking Habits

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

A person’s IQ during high school is predictive of alcohol consumption later in life, according to a study by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers published in Alcohol and Alcoholism. Participants with higher IQ levels were significantly more likely to be moderate or heavy drinkers, as opposed to abstaining.

“We’re not saying that your IQ in high school controls your destiny,” said senior author E. Sherwood Brown, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Distinguished Teaching Professor of Psychiatry and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern.

“But IQ levels could lead to intervening social factors that influence drinking, and it’s an important mechanism to explore. Higher IQ seemed to predict a greater likelihood of being a moderate or heavy drinker but not a binge drinker.”

Although Dr. Brown and UTSW colleagues have conducted numerous studies about alcohol use disorder, he said this is the first to examine predictors of drinking patterns.

For the study, Dr. Brown and UTSW colleagues turned to data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a dataset composed of IQ and lifestyle information from more than 10,000 Wisconsin high school seniors beginning in 1957. The participants were born around 1939.

UTSW researchers used a random sample of 8,254 survey participants who answered questions about their drinking habits in 1992 and 2004, when they would have been about 53 and 65 years old. Moderate drinking was categorized as 1 to 29 drinks per month for women and 1 to 59 drinks for men, and heavy drinking as 30 drinks or more per month for women and 60 drinks or more for men. Those with higher IQs were less likely to binge drink, measured at five or more drinks in one session.

The researchers found that for every one-point increase in IQ, there was a corresponding 1.6% increase in the likelihood that respondents reported moderate or heavy alcohol use.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-high-school-iq-habits.html