Alcohol, drug use in early age results in lower education

By Farheen Raza May 18th, 2012 ( 2 Comments )

Washington: Scientists have found evidence that early drug and alcohol use is associated with lower levels of educational attainment, a new study revealed.

Studying male twins who served in the military during the Vietnam era, scientists noted that those who started drinking or using drugs as youth or who became dependent on alcohol, nicotine or marijuana, were likely to not finish the college than those who didn’t use alcohol or drugs until later in life and never became dependent, ANI reported.

The study, by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System,

“We can’t say that substance dependence or early substance use causes lower educational achievement, but we do see a strong association,” Julia D. Grant, lead author of the study from Washington university of Medicine, said.

“Even after we statistically controlled for the genes and the environmental factors that twins share, we found a relationship between substance use and educational achievement,” she said.

Past studies about the relationship between substance use and education have delivered mixed results. But this study of 6,242 twins shows a link between fewer years of schooling and the onset of drinking before age 14.

“Studying identical and fraternal twin pairs is useful for examining things like substance use and education because we can assess the extent to which a given behaviour is influenced by genetic factors and by factors related to family and environment.

“Since identical twins share all of their genes and fraternal share about half, we can set up statistical comparisons to tease many of those factors apart,” she said.