Frequent Binge Drinking After Combat-Related TBI Is Not Uncommon

A brief summary of current research.

Frequent Binge Drinking After Combat-Acquired Traumatic Brain Injury Among Active Duty Military Personnel with a Past Year Combat Deployment

Adams, R, Larson, MJ, Corrigan, JD, Horgan, CM, Williams, TV (2012). Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation: Vol. 27(5), pp 349–360.

To determine whether combat-related traumatic brain injury is associated with post-deployment binge drinking, researchers surveyed more than 7,000 soldiers. TBI was strongly linked with binge drinking after controlling for other conditions such as PTSD and combat exposure. In this study, frequent binge drinking was defined as having five or more drinks on the same occasion, at least once per week, in the past 30 days.

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Posted on BrainLine January 7, 2013.

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Anonymous replied on Wed, 03/27/2013 - 11:34am Permalink

Although this is a very thourough experiment, I don't believe that I read here that caffeine addiction was ruled out as contributing to alchohol use. I believe that the majority of persons who have other substance addiction are also caffeine addicts. There is no reason why anyone should consume caffeine except to relieve caffeine withdrawl headache. I suggest that caffeine use is a gateway drug that leads to the use of not just alchohol but other drugs to get high. Caffeine tickles the fancy to get high, but the caffeine buzz is not good enough, so the user moves on to other drugs. So in other words, would the person with brain injury still use alchol to get high if the person was not first a caffeine addict.