Training program cuts drinking in college students

NEW YORK, Feb 24 (Reuters) A brief skills-training program, featuring interactive lectures and discussions, can help reduce alcohol use in university students who are considered to be at high-risk, according to findings from a Swedish study.

Young adults between 18 and 29 years of age have been shown to consume more alcohol than people in other age groups. This is particularly true for college students; in a recent study, 42.6 percent of college students reported heavy drinking in the past year compared with 38.1 per cent of noncollege students.

''Almost all universities have alcohol policies, and interventions greatly differ from one university to another,'' lead author Dr. Henriettae Stahlbrandt, from Lund University in Malmo, said in a statement. ''The skills-training program used in our study is...based on cognitive-skill intervention and motivational techniques. Personalized drinking feedback has also been found effective.'' The study, reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, involved 556 university students, living in 98 residence halls in Sweden, who were randomly assigned to the skills-training program, a 12-step-influenced program featuring lectures by therapists, or to a comparison non-treatment intervention.

A questionnaire called the ''alcohol use disorders identification test'' or AUDIT was used to assess problem drinking before during and at the end of the 2-year study.

High-risk alcohol use was defined as an AUDIT score of 8 or higher for men and 4 or higher for women.

In the overall analysis, students in all of the groups showed a significant and similar reduction in AUDIT scores during the study period, the report indicates.

Seventy-seven per cent of the students were identified as high-risk alcohol users. In this group, the skills-training program was more effective than the comparison intervention in reducing AUDIT scores. The skills-training program also appeared to be more effective than the 12-step-influenced program, although the difference between the two interventions was not statistically significant.

''The at-risk students - those with a higher AUDIT score and in greater danger of having negative consequences from alcohol consumption - in the brief skill-training program reduced their consumption more than the other two groups,'' Stahlbrandt said.

''By concentrating alcohol-intervention efforts on this group, a lot of benefits can be attained on both individual and public levels, meaning less of an economic burden and wasted personal time.'' REUTERS SSC VC0845