Understanding Risk Factors Involved in Initiation of Adolescent Alcohol Use
"We were able to predict, with 74 percent accuracy, which 12- to 14-year-old youth eventually went on to engage in alcohol use by late adolescence," said Lindsay Squeglia, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina. "Neural features appear to be important predictors," she said. "While we are not at the point where we can scan every child's brain and know if they will/will not begin using alcohol, this is an important step in understanding brain features that contribute to alcohol use during adolescence. We are publishing the script we used for the analyses so other groups can replicate findings, in hopes that a final, validated model can be used clinically to predict adolescent alcohol use." Squeglia will present this research at the 39th Annual Research Society on Alcoholism in New Orleans June 25-29, 2016. The researchers gathered data on 137 healthy alcohol- and drug...