As we were specifically interested in data addressing the interplay between alcohol use and the developing human brain, we required that studies were empirical (rather than theoretical or reviews) and contained a group of alcohol using (AU) human adolescents (see Table 1 for review criteria). To fully understand the impact of alcohol on the developing brain, we required that participants were adolescents, defined here as ages 12–19 years inclusive. We required that the sample size must include at least 12 AU adolescent participants. We wanted to evaluate how active alcohol consumption affects the human adolescent brain. We therefore excluded studies that did not contain AU samples, such as those investigating prenatal alcohol or other substance use exposure (Lebel et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2013), positive family history of AUDs (Herting, Fair, & Nagel, 2011; Hill, Terwilliger, & McDermott, 2013; Spadoni, Simmons, Yang, & Tapert, 2013), and genetic risk factors (Hill et al., 2011; Villafuerte et al., 2012) in the absence of active alcohol use. We wanted to assess the independent contribution of active alcohol use on the developing brain,
