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My son hasn't shown much interest in alcohol -- at least not yet (or to me!).  But a new study has found that you may be able to predict which of your children is going to binge drink in the future. Of course, genetics play a part.   And I may feel a little more nervous than most folks because alcoholism runs in my family. But the study found that genetics play only a small part.  Brain function and about 40 different other variables can also help scientists predict with about 70 percent accuracy which teens will become binge drinkers. When I was a young teen, a younger cousin used to go everywhere with her shampoo bottle.  Turns out it was really liquor.  Not sure if this is why but at the age of 15, she became pregnant, and was able to hide it till about her eighth month.  Her family thought she had just gained weight.  It was a sad coincidence that her baby was born with Down Syndrome, which had nothing to do with her lack of prenatal...

At first this didn't sound so shocking to me: 1 in 25 middle schoolers are binge drinkers .  Maybe because mine's a computer nerd. But then I got to thinking about it. True, the stats come from Canada, but could they be much different in this country?  A whopping 4% of kids 12 to 14 consumed five or more drinks on more than one occasion, according to a new study, newswise.com reports. The findings also indicated that the odds of binge drinking were twice as high among youth with three or more chronic conditions. "We are particularly concerned that the young adolescents most likely to binge drink are those who have substantial physical health challenges” the Web site quotes lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson, Sandra Rotman Chair at the University of Toronto’s Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.  "We also found that youth with mood disorders had three times the odds of binge drinking," adds co-author Matthew Sheridan, a manager at a children’s mental hea...

This probably something you've never thought about but did you ever wonder why wounds don't heal well if you drink, well, a lot? A new study has found that p eople who are injured while binge drinking are much slower to heal from wounds suffered in car accidents, shootings, fires, etc. Newswise.com reports that bingeing on alcohol  reduces levels of key components of the immune system involved in healing. In the United States, alcohol dependence and/or abuse affects 20 percent to 40 percent of hospitalized patients, according to the Web site. Alcohol increases the risk of infections in the hospital, including surgical site infections. Patients with surgical-site infections are hospitalized for twice as long, have a higher rate of re-admission and are twice as likely to die as patients who did not binge drink. The study showed, for the first time, that binge alcohol exposure reduces the amount of white blood cells that chew up bacteria and debris. This defect, in part,...

When was the last time you saw a drunk rat ? Seriously.  Scientists are studying them to see if they can identify what in the brain makes them become alcoholics, well, compulsive drinkers. A research team has "identified circuitry in the brain that drives compulsive drinking in rats, and likely plays a similar role in humans," according to newswise.com. The scientists found neural pathways that run between the part of the brain associated with critical thinking and risk assessment, and another part that is "a critical area for reward and motivation," the article states. Medications do exist to target these areas of the brain, but this new discovery could possibly provide "an accelerated track to new treatments for compulsive drinking." But don't think the rats had a wild party.  They were regularly given a liquid that was 20% alcohol.  But they also drank both unmixed alcohol "and alcohol mixed with extremely bitter quinine," new...