Evidence that late adolescent drinking leads to physical and mental health problems in adulthood is of “poor quality”, researchers have concluded.
British experts challenged received wisdom as the World Health Organisation called for tougher action globally to reduce over-use of alcohol by young adults.
Jim McCambridge from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK, says most research into the link between teen drinking and later life is of "weak design".
He has published his findings after reviewing 54 studies with colleagues.
Writing in PLoS Medicine, Dr McCambridge, a senior lecturer in behaviour change, said although there was an urgent need for better studies, previous research provided some evidence that high alcohol consumption in late adolescence often continued into adulthood, causing an increased risk of long-term dependency problems.
There was also enough evidence to recommend that adolescents should reduce drinking to prevent long-term adverse consequences of drinking and to protect against more immediate harms.
The studies they looked at included at least one quantitative measure of the effects of alcohol, on outcomes in adulthood such as death, alcohol dependence, criminal offences, mental health, educational attainment, and smoking.
The majority were multiple reports from ten cohorts, half of which were from the US.
“It is clear that the evidence base on long-term consequences is not as extensive or as compelling as it could be,” write the authors.
Despite this limitation, they said: “Late adolescent alcohol consumption appears a probable cause of increased drinking well into adulthood, through to ages at which adult social roles have been achieved.
“Heavier drinking seems most likely, however, to be only one component in a complex causal process, whose contribution has probably been overestimated in previous studies because of uncontrolled confounding, setting aside the uncertainties induced by self-reported data.”
* According to the World Health Organisation, some four per cent of all deaths are linked to alcohol – with 20 per cent of men in Russia dying from drink-related causes.
It says nine per cent of all deaths of young adults aged 15 to 29 are caused by alcohol – a total of 320,000 globally. In 2005, adults consumed an average of more than six litres a year of pure alcohol.
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