Alcohol Use in Adolescence and Later Working Memory: Findings From a Large Population-Based Birth Cohort

Abstract

AimsThe study aimed to examine the association between adolescent alcohol use and working memory (WM) using a large population sample.MethodsData from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children were used to investigate the association between alcohol use at age 15 years and WM 3 years later, assessed using the N-back task (N ~ 3300). A three-category ordinal variable captured mutually exclusive alcohol groupings ranging in order of severity (i.e. low alcohol users, frequent drinkers and frequent/binge drinkers). Differential dropout was accounted for using multiple imputation and inverse probability weighting. Adjustment was made for potential confounders.ResultsThere was evidence of an association between frequent/binge drinking (compared to the low alcohol group) and poorer performance on the 3-back task after adjusting for sociodemographic confounding variables, WM at age 11 years, and experience of a head injury/unconsciousness before age 11 years (β = −0.23, 95% CI = −0.37 to −0.09, P = 0.001). However, this association was attenuated (β = −0.12, 95% CI = −0.27 to 0.03, P = 0.11) when further adjusted for baseline measures of weekly cigarette tobacco and cannabis use. Weaker associations were found for the less demanding 2-back task. We found no evidence to suggest frequent drinking was associated with performance on either task.ConclusionsWe found weak evidence of an association between sustained heavy alcohol use in mid-adolescence and impaired WM 3 years later. Although we cannot fully rule out the possibility of reverse causation, several potential confounding variables were included to address the directionality of the relationship between WM and alcohol use problems.

Alcohol use and cognitive functioning in young adults: improving causal inference

“…Unlike the studies that have demonstrated a prospective association between binge drinking and cognitive functioning in adolescence e.g. (17)(18)(19)(20), we found little evidence in support of this association. The contrast in findings could be due to a number of possibilities.…”

“…Third, as alcohol use behaviours typically change over time (46), repeated measures of binge drinking were used in this study to capture heterogenous patterns across this sensitive period in comparison to our previous study which assessed alcohol use on one occasion (17). Finally, most of the previous studies (18)(19)(20) assessed cognitive functioning using a range of measures .…”

“…Studies that have examined this association using prospective data have largely revealed mixed findings. For example, some studies have found that alcohol use preceded deficits in domains of cognitive functioning (17)(18)(19)(20), while other studies have provided support for the opposite direction (21)(22)(23).…”

Effect of alcohol use on the adolescent brain and behavior

“…Utilizing data from 3,141 adolescents, frequent binge drinkers exhibited poorer working memory compared to the low alcohol group. However, this association was attenuated when adjusting for sociodemographic variables, tobacco, and cannabis use (52). In a sample of 89 young people who did not have a history of psychiatric disorders and did not regularly consume other drugs, consistent binge drinking over two years in late adolescence was associated with poorer immediate and delayed recall, retention, and working memory, compared to non-binge drinkers (53).…”

Testing the association between tobacco and cannabis use and cognitive functioning: Findings from an observational and Mendelian randomization study

“…The N-back task (2-back condition) was used to assess working memory. The N-back task (38) is widely used to measure working memory (39)(40)(41). A measure of discriminability (d′) was chosen as the primary outcome measure given it is an overall performance estimate.…”