Your High School IQ May Be a Predictor of your Alcohol Consumption in Later Life

A teenager’s IQ might strangely predict their future beverage preferences, though scientists are unsure why. A recent study of mostly White men and women in the US found that individuals with higher IQ scores during their freshman year of high school are more likely to consume alcohol regularly in adulthood.

The analysis found that IQ scores, which measure general intelligence, could predict whether teens were more likely to drink alcohol in mid-life rather than abstain, but didn’t indicate whether their drinking would be moderate or heavy.

Moderate drinking was defined as 1–29 drinks per month for women and 1–59 drinks for men, with heavy drinking being anything beyond that.

Health, Education, and Finances of Wisconsin High School Graduates

The study included data on health, education, and finances from 6,300 men and women who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1957. In 2004, 48 years later, participants reported how many alcoholic beverages they had consumed in the past month, along with how often they had five or more drinks in a single session, which qualifies as binge-drinking.

Researchers found that for every one-point increase in IQ, there was a 1.6% higher likelihood of being a moderate or heavy drinker compared to an abstainer. However, higher IQ scores were linked to fewer reported binge-drinking episodes.

Psychiatrist Sherwood Brown from UT Southwestern Medical Center clarifies that these findings don’t imply that IQ in adolescence “controls your destiny,” but they do suggest that IQ is associated with social factors that can affect drinking habits in mid-life.

When Brown and his team at UT examined socioeconomic factors, they discovered that household income partly explained the link between IQ and drinking habits, while education level did not influence this relationship.

“Although we can’t fully capture all the mechanisms underlying the connection between IQ and drinking, we know that income partly explains the link,” says neuroscientist Jayme Palka from UT.

Link Between IQ, Income, and Alcohol Consumption

Previous research has also associated higher IQ scores with higher household incomes, which in turn has been linked to more frequent alcohol consumption. This could be due to greater access to alcohol and “social drinking norms tied to prestige and success” in wealthier groups.

In 2020, a study of Norwegian men found that those with higher intelligence scores reported more frequent drinking in their late 20s compared to those with lower scores, with binge drinking driving this association.

However, the recent US study suggests this may not hold true for women. Binge drinking was less common among women than men, and in both groups, higher IQ scores were linked to less binge drinking in the future, not more.

However, this study was conducted with a predominantly White, non-Hispanic group, the majority of whom were women with a bachelor’s degree, so the findings may not be applicable to other populations.

UT researchers suggest that future studies should investigate the link between IQ and alcohol use disorder, as well as explore additional factors that could help explain the connection between cognition and drinking habits.

Read the original article on: Science Alert

Read more: Why Are Young People Drinking Less?