Young adult social drinkers: another group at risk?

Behavioral Medicine in Primary Prevention

This article is a selective overview of behavioral medicine approaches to primary prevention. The main areas of discussion concern addictive behaviors and dietary factors. Overall, traditional educational approaches appear to succeed in altering understanding of these problems, but are less effective in actual prevention. More recently, behavioral medicine efforts, which focus on psychological and social influences, have demonstrated encouraging results. However, further systematic research is needed on these promising approaches before definitive conclusions can be drawn. Suggestions are provided for future primary prevention efforts as well as discernment of important mediating variables.

Brain impairment in social drinkers? No cause for concern

Correlations between measures of alcohol consumption and cognitive test scores have been interpreted to reflect a chronic toxic effect of ethanol on brain function in light to moderate social drinkers. However, the data indicate that there is little support across research groups for any specific relationship and, at best, the effect of alcohol consumption accounts for only a small proportion of variance. Consideration of test validity suggests that the principal measure of ability used in this research is not capable of elucidating cerebral deficit. Further, the pattern of observed correlations is not consistent with the assumption that the putative effects of social drinking involve deficits less severe but similar in type to those seen in chronic alcoholics. Instead, an association between innate ability, demographic variables, and drinking behavior in the general population is the most parsimonious explanation of all the data.