Energy drinks are beverages that claim to offer a surge of liveliness by using a blend of high doses of caffeine and other stimulants, however, the real effects of what it can do when mixed with alcohol has still been an unknown territory until the study prepared by Mary Claire O'Brien, Thomas P. McCoy, Scott D. Rhodes, Mark Wolfson, and Ashley Wagoner was completed. The study is called, "Caffeinated Cocktails: Energy Drink Consumption, High-risk Drinking, and Alcohol-related Consequences among College Students." Thirty four percent of people aged 18 to 24 are regular energy drink users, since the marketing campaigns of various high budgeted companies are targeting this crowd. On campuses across the country, the consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks is becoming increasingly popular among college students. There are an inadequate number of studies and research that suggest that energy drink consumption lessens alcohol intoxication. As a result, in this study, the authors' objective was to find out the affiliation between energy drink use, high-risk drinking behavior, and alcohol-related consequences.
The authors invited a stratified unsystematic sample of undergraduate college students in North Carolina to participate in their study. These students came from 10 different universities (8 public and 2 private) and took part in an online based survey of alcohol use and other risk behaviors. The survey was web-based and was created after reviewing the Harvard College Alcohol Survey, the CORE questionnaire, the Youth Survey questionnaire used in the National Evaluation of the Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws program, DeLong's College Drinking Survey, and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. At first, they placed students in common areas on each campus (for example, dorms, residence halls, cafeterias, conference rooms, etc.). Students were then encouraged to check their emails accounts for a request to partake in the study. Afterwards, the authors then arbitrarily selected students from each campus by academic classification of their class, such as freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Subsequently, the students were sent postcards asking them to check their email accounts for the invitation request asking them to complete the survey. These same students, who were selected at random, all had an email in their inbox with the details of the study and encouraging them to complete the online assessment via the secure URL link. Those who either forgot or did not participate for some other reason were sent up to 4 reminder emails by the system. All students who fulfilled their obligations by completing the survey were sent $10.00 via PayPal (an online site owned by EBay that allows users to send and receive money instantly to and from their bank accounts). From the list of completions, one student from each school was selected, by a random drawing to win $100.00 in PayPal funds. The sample size was diverse between campuses based on the enrollment of the school. Conversely, a goal response allocation of 33% was implicated so that the selected samples would be an adequate amount of completed surveys to provide the arithmetical influence necessary for the study. As a result, the URL of the website used for the survey was set to automatically shut down after the target number from each school was realized. A total of 4,271 students completed the survey.
Questioning Students
Undergraduates were asked in the assessment if in the past 30 days they had experienced any of the following magnitudes as a consequence of their drinking or the drinking of others: being taken advantage of sexually, taking advantage of another sexually, driving under the influence of alcohol, riding with a driver who was under the influence of alcohol, being hurt or injured, or requiring medical treatment. In addition, students were asked why they combine alcohol with energy drinks; they were allowed to select multiple reasons. Moreover, students were asked to assess high-risk drinking (meaning either heavy drinking or drinking to drunkenness) included: typical number of drinks in a drinking episode; number of days of binge (which was defined as drinking over 4 drinks for females or 5 drinks for males) drinking in the past 30 days (range = 0-30 days); number of days drunk in a typical week (range 0-7 days); and highest number of drinks in a single episode in the past 30 days. Students were furthermore asked ''in a typical week, how many days do you get drunk?'' where drunk was defined in the standard way as ''dizzy, unsteady, or sick to your stomach.''
Data Analysis
The goals of the numerical breakdown were to:" 1) estimate the prevalence of mixing alcohol with energy drinks among past 30-day drinkers, 2) examine the association of mixing alcohol with energy drinks and high-risk drinking, and 3) examine the association of mixing alcohol with energy drinks and alcohol-related consequences, after adjusting for drinking behaviors." The authors sought to scrutinize the added danger of totaling energy drinks to alcohol. Investigate skip patterns restricted the questions about energy drink use to those students who reported that they had drunk alcohol at least once in the past 30- days (N = 2,886; 68% of all students). Drinking outcomes were analyzed using multivariable linear mixed-effects modeling with modification completed for a student's gender, age, race, fraternity or sorority status, athlete status, and within-campus clustering. Because students were nested within 10 universities, a mixed-model approach was used in the arithmetic analysis. Precisely, an arbitrary intercept model was fit to account for the within-university association of student answers so that students were considered nested within campus. Adjusted means and standard errors were calculated for consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks, where the observed marginal's of the covariates were used in valuing.
Results
A total of 4,271 students of the 4,237 completed the survey, about 99.2% of the total amount, by answering questions about past 30-days of drinking and consuming alcohol mixed with energy drinks. On a cross note, 61% of these students were female and the typical student age was 20.4 years, which ranged anywhere from 17-30 years old. Of the 4,237 students, 2,886 (68%) stated drinking alcohol at least on one occasion in the past 30 days. Eighty-seven percent of student drinkers were between the ages of 18 and 22 years. Among drinkers, 697 students, or 24%, reported consuming alcohol mixed with energy drinks on a minimum of 1 day in the past 30 days. All succeeding studies were limited to past 30-day drinkers. In the bivariate studies, students who were male, white, intramural athletes, fraternity or sorority members or pledges, and younger were more probable to consume alcohol mixed with energy drinks. The average age for a first drink was younger amongst students who testified consuming alcohol mixed with energy drinks (15.1 years vs. 16.0 years). Students who reported consuming alcohol mixed with energy drinks had additional drinking days on normal during their last year of high school than those who did not report consuming (1.7 days vs. 1.2 days). Fifty-five percent of students who consumed alcohol mixed with energy drinks alleged they did so to hide the zest of the alcohol (48% of male mixers and 61% of female mixers.) Fifteen percent of students conveyed mixing alcohol with energy drinks.
As a result, pupils who informed the authors that they consumed alcohol mixed with energy drinks increased occurrence of all six alcohol-related concerns due to their individual drinking. In addition, they were more probable to be taken advantage of sexually, take advantage of someone else sexually, ride with a driver who was under the influence of alcohol, be hurt or injured, or require medical treatment.
Conclusion
Virtually one-quarter of current college student drinkers confess to mixing alcohol with energy drinks. These students are at amplified danger for alcohol-related significances, even after altering the amount of alcohol consumed. Additional research is needed to comprehend this connotation and to progress targeted interventions to condense risk. This study used cross-sectional data, which limits their ability to assess causal relationships. Furthermore, students may have under- or over estimated their alcohol use. The study shows that self-reported data is valid based on previous studies of alcohol use in college students, unlike other patterns or levels of drinking the might have different response preferences. Internet surveys are an effective technique for collecting survey data on college students' alcohol use, but several demographic and technologic criteria introduce variability in the response rate in Web-based surveys, including gender, school year, and the prevalence of computer use in everyday campus life. Also, policy actions may be justified, for instance, demanding that energy drinks being sold in the United States convey a caution label concerning the risk of drinking these beverages with alcohol. As part of a program, college staff should be able to notify students of the health hazards associated with energy drinks. Health care providers in emergency departments and campus health centers should ask college students whether they consume alcohol mixed with energy drinks, as part of repetitive conversations about unhealthy alcohol use. To conclude, the free circulation of energy drinks at campus-sponsored occasions, which is a shared practice among many schools, should be reexamined.
