The irony of drinking to health and happiness

In testing the relationship between alcohol consumption in young people and depression in young adulthood, in The Lancet Psychiatry, Gemma Hammerton and colleagues 1 address a very important question. Depression causes an enormous public health burden. WHO identifies depression as affecting more than 4% of the world's population and causing substantial disability. 2 Understanding how modifiable risk factors, such as alcohol consumption, influence the onset of depression in adulthood is therefore a crucial question for epidemiology to tackle. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a highly appropriate data resource to use to address this question. ALSPAC is well placed in the UK's catalogue of large birth cohort studies, sitting between the 1970 British Cohort Study and the Millennium Cohort Study, uniquely assessing the development of children born in the 1990s. I was involved in a systematic review of available evidence on the adult outcomes of late adolescent alcohol consumption, 3 which concluded that the area needed more high-quality prospective cohort studies, and Hammerton and colleagues' work strongly contributes to this need.