The relationship between alcohol outcomes and both baseline and change in depressive symptoms differed across sex, with females demonstrating a stronger association which proved more robust to adjustment for covariates. Among males, baseline levels of depressive symptoms were positively associated with later harmful alcohol use; however, change in depressive symptoms across the adolescent period was related to neither use nor harmful use. Observed associations were substantially attenuated in fully adjusted models, particularly when childhood conduct problems were accounted for. Among females, change in depressive symptoms was strongly positively associated with both alcohol use and harmful use. In addition, baseline level of depressive symptoms was positively associated with harmful use. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that the relationship between adolescent depressive symptoms and later alcohol use differs across sex and alcohol outcome. Generally, the associations identified in the current study are consistent with previous reports of positive associations between depressive symptoms and alcohol use [8–11, 34–36], though not all previous work has employed longitudinal data or conducted analyses separately by sex and hence the current results could explain some inconsistencies in some previous work.
