Dr. Ralph W. Hingson of Boston University School of Public Health's Youth Alcohol Prevention Center led the study, which also found that people who start drinking very young are more likely to become dependent on alcohol faster and remain dependent longer.

Dependent Within 10 Years

Forty-seven percent of the individuals in the study who had started drinking at 13 or younger became dependent on alcohol within 10 years, the investigators found. In contrast, only 4 percent of those who began drinking at 21 or older met the criteria for alcohol dependence within a decade.

Of those who started consuming alcohol before age 14, 27 percent were considered dependent prior to reaching the age of 25, while just 4 percent of those who started at 21 or later were considered problem drinkers by 25.

Study Controls

There are many factors that could be involved in the link between early drinking and alcoholism, the researchers noted, and they used statistical methods of factoring in their influence.

Those include family history of alcohol dependence, childhood behavior, mental health and education level attained.

However, even after controlling for those possible influences, the scientists concluded that people who began drinking early were 2.6 times more likely to have experience alcohol dependence lasting longer than year and almost three times as likely to have more symptoms of alcohol dependence than those who started drinking later.