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$10 million grant from NIAAA
New SPH center will study youth drinking, promote public awareness
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Ralph Hingson Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Ralph Hingson has long been concerned about the effects of alcohol on public health, and especially on the lives of young people. Numerous studies by the associate dean for research and professor at the School of Public Health have shown that drinking takes a devastating toll on the nation's youth.
On February 17, however, Hingson had cause to smile, and not merely because West Virginia had just become the 47th state to lower its threshold for impaired driving from .10 blood-alcohol content to .08 — a law whose implementation he has been pushing nationwide. On the same day, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) announced a $10 million grant to SPH to fund a Center to Prevent Alcohol-Related Problems Among Young People.
It is the first research center grant ever awarded to a school of public health in the NIAAA's 27-year history, and will enable SPH to significantly expand and enhance its alcohol-related research by fostering collaborative projects and activities among SPH researchers and researchers at the School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center.
“This will also be the first NIAAA-funded research center that will focus solely on preventing alcohol problems among young people,” says Hingson, who led the team that secured the grant. “On two counts this is a very exciting development.”
The NIAAA, part of the National Institutes of Health, provides leadership in the national effort to reduce alcohol-related problems by conducting and supporting a wide range of research in this area. Of late, the institute has concentrated on drinking among young people, a situation that it says is getting worse.
“Studies have shown that the younger people are when they first begin to drink, the greater the likelihood that at some point in their lives they are going to develop alcohol dependence,” Hingson says. Furthermore, according to his research, “these young people are more likely later as adults to experience unintentional injuries under the influence of alcohol, motor vehicle crashes because of drinking, and physical fights after drinking.”
The center will focus on three primary and three pilot research projects and will also host seminars and workshops for the public. “First, I'm going to do an analysis of some existing data further exploring the relationship between the age that people begin to drink and the development of alcohol-related problems later in life,” says Hingson. “We want to know why there is a relationship — what are the mechanisms? I think that the answers to these questions will help us better frame intervention efforts.”
A second study will investigate the aftereffects of heavy drinking on the academic performance of college students. “There has already been a lot of research on the correlation between alcohol abuse and poor grades,” he says. “We know that among high school students, for example, those who engage in a pattern of frequent binge drinking — having five or more drinks in a row on six occasions a month — are three times more likely to get mostly Ds or Fs on their report cards. The question is: why? Is it because of the alcohol consumption alone, or is it also the other risky behaviors that they are more inclined to engage in?”
Hingson says that in the study SPH Professor Jonathan Howland, chairman of the department of social and behavioral sciences and one of the new center's researchers, and colleagues will compare the academic performance on Graduate Record Examinations and memory tests of students who have engaged in binge drinking the night before the tests relative to students who had no alcohol.
The third study, conducted by MED Emergency Medicine Professor Edward Bernstein and SPH Professor Judith Bernstein, will evaluate the effectiveness of brief alcohol counseling for patients at pediatric hospital emergency departments. “Studies in the past at adult emergency departments and in trauma centers show that when people are injured under the influence of alcohol, there is a ‘teachable moment' in this setting,” says Hingson. “Many of them realize that their drinking has just produced a serious health risk, and you can more easily capture their attention. We want to see if the same thing holds true for younger drinkers.”
Hingson says that the center also aims to “work closely with a half-dozen college communities in Massachusetts and help develop campus-community partnerships to reduce college drinking problems.”
The NIAAA grant further affirms SPH's leadership position in the study of the social and behavioral aspects of youth alcohol use and abuse, according to SPH Dean Robert Meenan. “As a result of this award from the National Institutes of Health,” he says, “the school now has center grant funding from all of the federal agencies that support public health–related research, including the Centers for Disease Control, the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Howland says that the grant is “timely, given recent local outbreaks of alcohol-related incidents involving area college youth.”
27
February 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations