Study: Substance abuse among teens can negatively impact mental abilities

By Staff Writer

A new study reveals that teenagers who abuse alcohol or marijuana are at-risk of harming their mental abilities.

The study - which was conducted by the University of New Mexico School of Medicine - compared the mental aptitude of adolescents in three different groups: those who abused alcohol and marijuana, non-users and those whose parents were alcoholics. Researchers found that the more a student drank, the lower their test performances were.

Teens who abused alcohol performed poorly on executive functioning tests in particular, which indicates that excessive drinking can hamper their attention spans and cognitive abilities. Youth who used marijuana were more likely to have poor memory than non-users.

The lead author of the study is worried that kids who start drinking heavily or smoking cannabis at an early age may be affected for their entire lives. The results of this research were published in the study Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

According to the 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which questioned high school students throughout the U.S., approximately 42 percent of respondents drank some amount of alcohol within 30 days of taking the survey. Almost one in every four students said that they had binge drank in the previous month, while 10 percent said that they had driven after drinking alcohol.