Age 18-30 Trajectories of Beverage-Specific Binge Drinking Prevalence Over 30 Years for Men and Women in the United States.

Authors

Justin Jager, Jin Yan, Paul Espinoza, Megan E Patrick, Katherine M Keyes

Published in

Alcohol, clinical & experimental research. Volume 50. Issue 10. Pages e70420.

Abstract

Binge drinking contributes to substantial mortality, morbidity, and economic costs in the United States. Although trends in and determinants of overall binge drinking are well characterized, little is known about how binge drinking trends vary by beverage type (beer, wine, liquor) across young adulthood and over historical time. Understanding beverage-specific patterns may clarify shifts in alcohol-related risks and inform beverage-specific policy.
Data were drawn from the Monitoring the Future longitudinal study, which sampled representative cohorts of US high-school seniors from 1976 through 2008 and followed them across seven waves through age 30 from 1988 through 2020 (N = 20,684). Piecewise latent-growth models assessed age trends, cohort trends, and age-by-cohort interactions in overall, beer, wine, and liquor binge drinking prevalence separately for each sex.
For both sexes, overall binge drinking followed an inverted U pattern across age (increases from age 18-22, decreases through age 30); beer and liquor binge drinking followed the overall inverted U pattern, whereas wine was flat. Cohort trends varied sharply by age and differentially so by beverage type. For both sexes, historical decreases in overall binge drinking at the outset of young adulthood (age 18) were a function of historical decreases in beer and wine. However, due to historical increases in liquor and wine during the latter portion of young adulthood, for both sexes age 18 decreases in overall binge drinking were not maintained through age 30, where levels were flat for men and increased for women.
Beverage-specific trends reveal that historical declines in binge drinking at younger ages of young adulthood are concentrated in beer and wine, whereas increases in liquor and wine at older ages offset these initial declines. Beverage-specific policies with evidence-based efficacy and cost effectiveness, such as increasing price and reducing availability, may help reduce emerging risks related to liquor and wine binge drinking.

PMID:
42885170
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 16 Oct 2026.

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