High-Intelligence High School Students More Likely to Be Moderate and Heavy Drinkers: Study

More likely to overlap?

High school students with higher IQs are significantly more likely to be moderate or heavy drinkers as adults, according to a new study from UT Southwestern Medical Center.

“We’re not saying that your high school IQ controls your destiny,” said senior study author Dr. E. Sherwood Brown. “But IQ levels may lead to the interference of social factors that influence drinking, and it is an important mechanism to explore.”

The research drew on data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which boasts IQ and lifestyle information from more than 10,000 Wisconsin high school seniors born around 1939.

Brown and his colleagues randomly selected 8,254 participants who had answered questions about their drinking habits in 1992 and 2004, when they were about 53 and 65 years old.

The researchers found that for every one-point increase in IQ, there was a 1.6% increase in the odds of a participant reporting moderate or heavy alcohol use.

Moderate drinking was defined as up to 29 drinks per month for women and up to 59 drinks for men, and heavy drinking as 30 or more drinks per month for women and 60 or more drinks for men.

The study authors theorized that those with a higher IQ may have a more stressful job, which may lead to excessive drinking, and those with higher incomes may have more opportunities for social drinking.

“While it is not possible to capture all of the underlying mechanisms that mediate the relationship between drinking and IQ, we do know that income partially explains the path between the two,” said study co-author Jayme Palka, an assistant professor of psychiatry.

The researchers noted that those with higher IQs were less likely to binge drink, which is considered to be five or more drinks in one sitting. Men reported more binge drinking episodes than women.

The findings were published in the July issue of the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.

The study authors said further research should include a more diverse population sample, as the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is almost all non-Hispanic white people.

The research comes as some experts say no amount of alcohol is good for you, with excessive drinking linked to the heart. and liver disease, stroke, various types of cancer, and a weakened immune system.