KEY POINTS:
A third of university students who drink alcohol suffer memory black-outs from drinking too much, a new survey has found.
Otago University alcohol researcher Dr Jennie Connor said yesterday this was a surprising finding from the internet-based survey by an international team of researchers.
"It's associated with damage if you do that on a regular basis. These kids' brains have not finished developing."
The results also suggest binge-drinking students may be having more unprotected sex and hitting out more than other drinkers.
The study of New Zealand students' drinking habits found a high rate of heavy drinking.
Eighty-one per cent in the study, conducted at five universities, had consumed alcohol in the preceding four weeks and 37 per cent reported one or more binge-drinking sessions in the preceding week.
Both figures are in line with surveys of all young adults. But the alcohol-related harms of heavy drinking may be worse for the students:
* 33 per cent of drinking students had a memory black-out in the preceding four weeks, compared with 13 per cent of drinkers in a 2004 national survey from the whole population who had more than one in the preceding year.
* 6 per cent of drinkers in the university survey had unprotected sex in the preceding four weeks, compared with 3.3 per cent in the national survey who had unprotected sex more than once in the preceding year.
* 5 per cent of the student drinkers reported being physically aggressive in the four-week period, compared with 2.2 per cent in the national survey who had got into a physical fight more than once in the preceding year.
Some of these differences will be from comparing the young age group of the students with the national study of those aged 12 to 65, but one of the authors of the university study, Dr Kypros Kypri, of Newcastle University in Australia, said yesterday this was unlikely to be the sole explanation.
An earlier study comparing Otago University students with a national sample in the same age group had found heavier rates of drinking-per-session and higher rates of related hazardous behaviours, Dr Kypri said.
The latest study found little difference between the sexes at university in binge-drinking twice or more in the preceding week (men 15 per cent, women 14 per cent), whereas the 2004 national study found males of any age were more prone to heavy drinking than females of a comparable age.
The study, published on-line in the journal Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research, indicates that binge-drinking university students learned the habit at high school.
The authors say strategies are needed to reduce the availability and promotion of alcohol on and around campuses and to reduce drinking by high school students.
