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Medical News: Texting May Turn Teens Off Alcohol

Being in touch with teens via text about their drinking habits may make them put down the bottle, researchers found.

Teens identified as hazardous drinkers in an assessment group had a median of seven weeks (interquartile range three to nine weeks) with a heavy drinking day (≥four drinks for women; ≥five drinks for men) compared with a median of two weeks (IQR one to seven weeks) in an intervention group who set goals to lessen their alcohol intake through support via text messaging, Brian Suffoletto, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues reported online in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

“When we used text-messaging to collect drinking data and to offer immediate feedback and support to young adults discharged from the emergency department, they drank less,” Suffoletto said in a statement.

Being in touch with teens via text about their drinking habits may make them put down the bottle.

Within the intervention group, those who had heavy drinking days, but agreed to set a goal to diminish their intake, ended up drinking heavily again only 36% of the time the following week, compared with 63% of the time for those who didn’t set goals.

Some work has shown that text messaging can be helpful for providing feedback to patients and for potentially changing behaviors, the researchers said. At the same time, they said, emergency departments provide an opportunity to screen youths for risky drinking behaviors.

READ MORE via Medical News: Texting May Turn Teens Off Alcohol – in Pediatrics, General Pediatrics from MedPage Today (http://www NULL.medpagetoday NULL.com/Pediatrics/GeneralPediatrics/30285?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyHeadlines&utm_source=WC&eun=g281938d0r&userid=281938&email=rmiles null@null daybreakinfo NULL.org&mu_id=).