Stressful life events influence transitions among latent classes of alcohol use.

Abstract

Stressful life events (SLEs) have been associated with an increased risk of heavy drinking, suggesting individuals may use alcohol to cope with negative life events. However, little research has explored the extent to which SLEs have different effects on later alcohol use based on one’s current alcohol use pattern. We replicated prototypical patterns of alcohol use via latent class analysis at Waves 2, 3, and 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 4,569). Latent transition analysis was then used to examine the extent to which SLEs influenced the likelihood of stability or change in class membership from adolescence to early adulthood. Results suggested that adolescents were more likely to transition into different patterns of alcohol use as they entered early adulthood but were more likely to retain the same drinking pattern once in early adulthood. Among those who typically abstained, experiencing SLEs was associated with greater odds of transitioning to heavier drinking or problematic patterns of alcohol use. However, among those who had heavy or problematic alcohol use patterns, SLEs were associated with greater odds of decreasing alcohol use to either heavy or abstaining levels. Results suggest those who previously abstained may begin to use alcohol as a coping mechanism following stressful events, whereas those who drank heavily may decrease or abstain from alcohol use following life stress as a means of enacting positive life changes. The results encourage further study into factors that differentiate changes in alcohol use among light drinkers following SLEs.

Patterns of substance use before and after hospitalization among patients seen by an inpatient addiction consult service: A latent transition analysis

“…LTA provides information about baseline behavior, follow-up behavior, and the probability of transitioning or changing over a period of time (11). LTA has been previously used to explore changes in singular substance use, particularly among patients with alcohol use disorder (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21), and among adolescents and college students (12,15,22,23), but has been used widely in other areas of change research as well (24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). LTA is hypothesized to be of particular use in modeling changes in substance use (31).…”

Risk, Symptoms, and Well‐Being: Emerging Adult Latent Profiles During Treatment

“…At the same time, we also observed that the presence of SLEs was associated with improvement, as EAs in the resilient subgroup were more likely to switch to the moderately healthy subgroup, and EAs in the languishing subgroup to the resilient subgroup. Hoyland and Latendresse (2018) found a similar influence for SLEs, as frequent and heavy drinkers switched to nonproblematic or abstaining profiles in the presence of SLEs. As Hoyland and Latendresse surmised, this change may have been “a result of enacting positive life changes following stressful or traumatic events … a ‘critical transition point’ where one decides to enact positive life changes” (p. 734).…”

“…For the LTA, we modeled the independently determined latent categorical profile variables in a logistic regression (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2014b). We examined time lag (Van De Schoot et al, 2017) and SLEs as predictors of latent profile membership and latent transition probabilities (Hoyland & Latendresse, 2018). Because full‐information maximum likelihood estimation is not available when including covariates in an LTA model in Mplus, we used data imputation (using five data sets) for the covariates with missing data (Wray‐Lake & Shubert, 2019) and examined their influence on the latent profile variables, which had parameters fixed during the two‐step LPA procedure (Asparouhov, 2018b).…”

“…However, these subgroups did differ on symptoms and the subjective well‐being indicator of life satisfaction, with low‐risk subgroups reporting lower symptoms and greater life satisfaction. Furthermore, Hoyland and Latendresse (2018) identified four subgroups of EA drinking behaviors and found that the greater the number of SLEs, the more abstainers were likely to transition to heavier drinking subgroups from their early to late 20s. The opposite was the case for those who were problem drinkers in their early 20s; they were most likely to transition to low‐intake drinkers as SLEs increased.…”

Comparison of personality factors among alcoholics and non-alcoholics attending a tertiary care center in Puducherry

“…The latter may be due to adaptation, which meant that people adjusted to life changes relatively quickly because they found explanations for unpleasant events and become accustomed to pleasant ones. [14][15][16] This could explain some observed trends in the years following certain personality changes, implying that heavy alcohol consumption levels eventually returned to pre-event levels.…”