Binge Drinking Doesn’t Hurt Next-Day Tests

Warning: Jonathan Howland is a professional. Do not try this at home.

Tipplers may be tempted to try to corroborate startling findings by Howland (SPH’84, UNI’86), a professor of community health sciences at the School of Public Health: binge drinking the night before an exam doesn’t impair performance.

But it does take a toll on attention-reaction times and mood and is fraught with other peril, according to Howland and his team, co-led by Brown’s Damaris Rohsenow.

They analyzed 193 students, ages 21 to 24, from greater Boston universities over the course of two nights, separated by a week. One evening, some subjects drank beer, raising their blood alcohol level to 0.12 percent, and others drank nonalcoholic beer. The next week, each subject received the opposite drink.

The morning after each drinking session, participants took practice versions of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and a quiz on a lecture they’d heard the previous day.

Result: students’ GRE and quiz scores were no different whether they had drunk alcohol or the nonalcoholic beer.

The study, published in this month’s issue of the journal Addiction, has raised plenty of eyebrows.

“This doesn’t disprove that there could be a relationship between alcohol use and academic performance,” says Howland, because test-taking is only one educational element: hungover students can sleep through a test, miss a class, or not learn as much because of attention and reaction problems.

“Beyond the potential implications it could have for your academic performance, more serious is the potential for injury, driving drunk, getting in a fight, or having unprotected sex,” Howland adds. “This study is by no means an affirmation of risky drinking behavior.”

Howland, who has researched alcohol’s day-after effects on sailors, among other occupations, wasn’t surprised that binge drinkers could handle the GRE, which measures skills (like critical thinking) acquired over many years. He says his findings suggest that “if you have learned a task well, it can probably take the hit of at least the alcohol levels we were exposing people to. That’s deeply embedded stuff.”

He was more surprised that drinkers fared well on the quizzes that tested recall of recently learned information. A possible explanation is found in work he’s done with BU psychiatry colleagues visually monitoring brain activity in hungover students. “You can actually see more brain being recruited,” he says. “They may be concentrating harder” to compensate.

“I was excited that I would actually be paid to have a few beers,” recalls participant Caroline Littlefield (CAS’07). The drinking was in a “controlled, hospital-like setting,” with the researchers asking subjects to drink the first two beers quickly, then proceed at a more leisurely pace, she says.

“We were given playing cards and videos to watch, though we were not allowed to leave the kitchen unattended,” Littlefield remembers. “We were not to discuss whether we thought we had a beer or a placebo.” Taste aside, by the end of the night it wasn’t hard to figure out which was which, she says.

She had only a slight hangover the next morning, but “taking the tests was tiring, and I would have preferred not to have been hungover.”

She adds another variable: other participants confided that they normally drank much more, and Littlefield suggests that binge-drinking students may be accustomed to performing in an academic environment while hungover.

For safety reasons, an EMT and a police officer monitored subjects overnight. Researchers also screened participants to ensure that they didn’t have a drinking problem, but all had to have gone on a drinking binge at least once within the previous 30 days. “We didn’t want any kids who hadn’t had the amount of alcohol we were going to give them,” Howland says.

“Our studies, where we’ve used this amount of alcohol, have been approved by institutional review boards at Harvard, the University of Michigan, Brown, the BU Medical Center, and Linkoping, Sweden,” he adds. “We have, over the years, dosed almost 600 people to that level, and we’ve never had a problem. We had one person who became intoxicated. She was fine. She slept it off.”

A study that induced drinking, financed by SPH’s Youth Alcohol Prevention Center? No irony, says Howland, although funders might be both surprised and less than overjoyed by the findings: the center is supported by the anti–alcohol abuse arm of the National Institutes of Health, which bankrolls most of this kind of research.

“The only thing that makes people quizzical about this is that we didn’t find anything” proving test-taking impairment, Howland says. “That’s not the NIH’s fault.”

One-third or more of college students nationwide acknowledge taking part in binge drinking, the researchers write. For most adults, binge drinking is defined as downing five or more drinks for men and four or more for women in about two hours.

Rich Barlow can be reached at barlowr@bu.edu.