Young women are hitting the bottle more than their male counterparts. According to a newly published research letter, women between the ages of 18 and 25 binge drink more than guys their age.
Binge drinking is when a woman has four or more drinks at one occasion and when a man has five or more, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The study performed cross-sectional analyses of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It looked at sex-based differences in the 18+ crowd between two time periods: 2017 and 2019, and 2021 and 2023.
In the first timeframe, women overall and aged between 18 and 25 both reported binge drinking less than men. Young men were found to be 1.2 percent more likely to engage in the behavior than young women.
That changed, however, in the second time period. While women overall were still found to binge drink less than men, young women were not. Instead, women between 18 and 25 were 1.8 percent more likely to do so than men their age.
There’s also heavy drinking, when women have eight or more drinks per week and men have 15 or more. In that category, men led the pack in both time frames, both generally and in the young person age group.
What Led to the Drinking Change
In terms of the binge drinking change, the study noted that many things could have prompted the result.
“Our findings may be due to more rapid decreases in binge drinking over time among young adult males relative to females, or to plateauing or increases in binge drinking among females,” the authors of the study wrote. “Further investigation using other nationally representative surveys is needed to elucidate these explanations.”
The authors noted that, given “rising alcohol-related liver disease and mortality among females relative to males, clinicians should ensure that young adult female populations are being appropriately screened for binge and heavy drinking to mitigate downstream alcohol-related health impacts.”
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