Online booze guide helps students cut down alcohol - New Scientist

Online booze guide helps students cut down alcohol - New Scientist

Drinking games, late-night parties far from disapproving parents, livers with all the vigour of youth: it's an intoxicating mix. Now, a cheap, web-based programme could help the heaviest drinkers cut down without the need for costly medical consultations.

Tested on more than 7000 undergraduate students in Australia, it identified 2400 who scored in the "harmful" range: men and women who said they had consumed more than six or four drinks respectively in one session in the past four weeks.

Follow-up studies with these students, however, showed that completing THRIVE, a 10-minute online consultation, helped many reduce the amount and how often they drank.

"The intervention produced a reduction of 11 per cent in the amount that heavy student drinkers consumed, lasting at least the six-month duration of the study," says Kypros Kypri of the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, New South Wales.

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