It’s 1 pm Saturday afternoon. You wake up and realize you’re wearing the same clothes from last night and didn’t even bother to take off your 4 inch heels. You roll over to see your roommate squinting her eyes to the light coming through the window and the two of you say in unison, “what happened last night?”
A blackout; a common term thrown around by college kids when trying to piece together an ‘epic’ drinking escapade or complaining in the Bodo’s line about their hangover from the night before. But this month blackouts, or periods of alcohol induced amnesia, have also been a topic in the news and in the science world. The media has been responding to a journal article published this month suggesting that blackout induced hospital visits by college students has become a financial burden on the health system. At first I was offended that I and my peers were being held responsible for the forever rising cost of health care. The article suggests that, at large, universities with enrollment numbers exceeding 40,000, alcohol related admissions to hospitals by students equate to about $500,000. While that is a lot of money for any single institution, I wondered if the news article overdramatized the bigger picture. So I worked the numbers and found that even if every single four year institution in the United States, both public and private, fell into this category the amount of money spent would only be 0.05% of the entire health care budget. In that respect, to me it looked like there are most likely some other major issues responsible for outrageous health care costs, but then again I am probably a biased college student.
But regardless, I do strongly agree that while a Thursday night out on the town is always a good time, there is no excuse for any student to wind up in the hospital after a night of drinking. So the science nerd in me wanted to look at what other research and statistics had been done on ‘blackouts’ on college campuses.
The most comprehensive article I found was from a study done at Duke in 2001. When I first read the article and the statistics that went along with how college kids are damaging their bodies, their GPA’s, and their futures by binge drinking, my response was: “how profound, a journal article on how 82.4% of college students drink alcohol, the majority consume 6 drinks on average per week, as drinking goes up GPA goes down , and the finale… drinking is associated with risky behavior.”
However, despite my initial reaction, my curiosity pushed me to delve further into the topic, and this is what I found:
Alcohol interrupts normal functioning of the hippocampus, the memory forming area of the brain by blocking NMDA receptor responses, and that’s why people blackout. Have you ever blacked out after ‘catching up,’ or consuming larger portions of alcohol in a short time period because you just arrived at a party sober while everyone else had already been drinking? That’s because you have given your hippocampus less time to adjust itself to that nasty toxic substance you’ve put into your body. Studies have shown that blackouts are therefore more likely to occur after a sharper rise in BAC. The statistics of the Duke study were acquired by email surveys taken by our collegiate peers at 5 different institutions. They found that of those who have consumed alcohol, half had claimed to have blacked out from drinking. Maybe that is surprising, maybe not, but among these students who had reported having at least one blackout, 55.5% indicated that they learned afterwards that they had participated in one or more of 9 actions in which the top three behaviors were insulting someone (33.0%), unwanted spending of money (27.3%) and engaging in some form of sexual activity (24.8%). Frequent blackout drinkers have also been shown to be at a higher risk for alcohol related injury, exactly what the media attacked collegiate for, and studies show that on the campus scene memory blackouts are a strong predictor of risky behavior and future alcohol-related injury. The final tidbit of information I stumbled across was that even though college women drink lower quantities of alcohol and also drink less frequently, they are just as likely as men to experience blackouts. This information suggests that the risk of experiencing blackouts appears to be greater among women than among men.
It may be that all these trends are ones that could probably be reasoned out by any student on grounds. Nonetheless, it was still interesting to actually see in writing and in statistics what we see happening in college communities on the weekends. And while the media may be over exaggerating and blaming young people for all the bad things happening in the world, at the end of the day, they are making a rather good underlying point; it is okay to be young and wild and free, but we must absolutely work to make smart decisions to keep us safe and healthy during these four glorious and unforgettable years.