explored their relationships with alcohol outcomes, and the samples’ age ranges differ across studies and from the age range in the current study. In a study of adolescents and young adults, Marmorstein (2009) examined trajectories of high vs. low depressive symptoms and found that the high class was more likely to have alcohol problems. In a sample of girls, classes exhibiting worse depressive symptoms were more strongly associated with alcohol initiation than other classes; no association was observed for trajectories of generalized anxiety symptoms; and courses of social anxiety symptoms exhibited conflicting associations with alcohol use onset (Marmorstein et al., 2010a). In boys, membership in the “high” class of generalized anxiety symptoms conferred higher risk of alcohol use initiation (Marmorstein et al., 2010b); the “high” class of social anxiety symptoms also exhibited a trend toward higher risk. Fleming and colleagues (2008) found that changes in adolescent depressive symptoms were modestly positively associated with changes in alcohol use, though that study did not identify individual classes of depressive symptoms. Not all studies support a relationship between growth in depressive symptoms and alcohol use (Hooshmand et al., 2012).
