College Drinking: Heavy Drinkers with Sensation-Seeking Disposition at Greatest Risk for Injury
The arrival at a college campus to begin a semester of study is not official for some until they celebrate the occasion. Much of this celebration includes the consumption of alcohol. It doesn’t matter if the student is of age or if the campus has a strict policy on drinking. The alcohol is available and will be consumed.
For many, this is more than just celebration and turns into a significant problem. According to a Science Daily report, more than 500,000 college students suffered alcohol-related injuries in 2001. This cited study examined the “dose-response” effect of quantities and frequencies and found that heavy drinkers with a sensation-seeking disposition had the greatest risk of alcohol-related injuries.
“In the United States, most – as in 70 percent – of college students have consumed alcohol in the past 30 days, and 40 percent of students have engaged in heavy drinking in the past two weeks,” said Marlon P. Mundt in the Science Daily piece. Mundt is assistant scientist in the department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and corresponding author for the study.
“More than 1,700 U.S. college students aged 18-24 died from alcohol-related injuries in 2001,” he added. “Approximately 2.8 million U.S. college students drove under the influence of alcohol in the past 12 months, and 600,000 U.S. college students were hit or assaulted by a student who was under the influence of alcohol.”
This particular study examined the combined “dose-response” effects of drinking quantities and frequencies on college alcohol-related injury risk. Mundt and his team found that those students who drank 8+ drinks for males and 5+ drinks for females at least four days per month were five times more likely to be injured than those who did not cross this drinking threshold.
Mundt highlighted that in order to tackle the drinking challenge on campus, administrators, parents and clinicians need to examine more than just quantities or frequency of consumption alone as they do not show the whole picture.
