Multimodal longitudinal prediction of alcohol-use trajectories in adolescents and young adults: Social context, real-life social affective benefit, and fronto-striatal involvement

Higher baseline alcohol consumption in a cohort of 378 community-based young drinkers is linked to social-use context, greater daily social-affective benefit, and heightened fronto-striatal reward engagement.

• Why it matters: Early drinking trajectories are linked to later substance misuse and mental health risk, but the social, affective, and neural factors shaping them are not well characterized.
• What they did: The study combined longitudinal phenotyping, ecological momentary assessment, and functional neuroimaging, then tested prediction of one-year drinking trajectories in 219 participants.
• The result: Over one year, individual social-affective benefit and substance-related social environmental factors showed the strongest predictive value for follow-up drinking trajectories, supporting risk detection and prevention development.

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