SCIENCE KNOWS BEST –
June 15, 2023 – The study tested the commonly held assumption that people who regularly drink in excess are better able to ‘hold their liquor’ than people who don’t regularly drink as much. Researchers examined data from the Chicago Social Drinking Project (CSDP), a placebo-controlled laboratory study of acute responses to alcohol.
Four hundred young adults were categorized based on their drinking patterns as light drinkers, heavy social drinkers, or as having alcohol use disorder.
On average, the light drinkers drank three drinks per week and drank about a quarter of days in the month.
Heavy social drinkers drank almost twenty drinks per week and tended to drink about half the days in the month. People with alcohol use disorder averaged nearly forty drinks per week and drank three out of four days a month.
Participants were given specific doses of alcohol and then tested for breath alcohol content and performance on fine motor skills and short-term memory tests half an hour, two hours, and three hours after drinking.
When they drank alcohol in amounts equivalent to a binge drinking episode–four or more drinks for women or five or more for men—the heavier drinkers showed greater tolerance than the lighter drinkers, performing better on the tests of fine motor skills and working memory with quicker recoveries as well as reporting feeling less impaired than the light drinker group.
However, when participants with alcohol use disorder drank a very high dose of alcohol that more closely aligned with their usual drinking pattern, they showed substantial impairments in working memory and fine motor skills, which were greater than those in light drinkers at the binge dose.
