https://nordot.app/1221531414709797135
https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-high-iqs-more-inclined-184943987.html
People with high IQs are more likely than others to be heavy drinkers but less likely to binge, according to medical researchers in the US.
After analysing health data and survey responses from more than 8,000 people in Wisconsin, researchers said that “participants with higher IQ levels” measured during their school years were “significantly more likely to be moderate or heavy drinkers” later in life.
“For every one-point increase in IQ, there was a corresponding 1.6% increase in the likelihood that respondents reported moderate or heavy alcohol use,” the team said, in findings published in the medical journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.
“Higher IQ seemed to predict a greater likelihood of being a moderate or heavy drinker but not a binge drinker,” said E. Sherwood Brown, a doctor and professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern.
“We’re not saying that your IQ in high school controls your destiny,” Brown explained, speculating that scoring well in the widely cited intelligence measurement “could lead to intervening social factors that influence drinking.”
“Income level partially influenced the relationship between IQ and drinking habits, potentially because higher IQ may lead to stressful jobs or more opportunities for social drinking among high earners,” the team suggested.
“While it’s not possible to capture all the underlying mechanisms that mediate the relationship between drinking and IQ, we know that income partially explains the pathway between the two,” said co-author Jayme Palka, assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern.
Palka and colleagues said more work on the subject was needed, including research taking in a wider geographic range of subjects beyond one US region.
The findings partly contradict a study of Swedish army conscripts published in 2015, which found “lower results on IQ tests” to be “associated with higher consumption of alcohol measured in terms of both total alcohol intake and binge drinking.”
