It is also possible that adolescents’ relative resistance to alcohol intoxication could be related in part to age differences in how much and how quickly alcohol gets into and out of their systems. However, the available evidence suggests that this is unlikely to be a significant contributor. Adolescents, with their faster resting metabolic rate, do tend to metabolize alcohol and other substances slightly faster than do adults. Yet even when this difference is significant, it is generally insufficient to account for the attenuated sensitivity of adolescents to alcohol (see Spear, 2007) and is seemingly difficult to relate to the increased sensitivity that adolescents show to other alcohol effects.
