Interviews with college students found that a shocking 34 percent of male drinkers and 24 percent of females said they had celebrated their 21st birthday by consuming 21 or more drinks, the New York Times reported.

Based on the data, researchers estimated that half of the men and more than a third of the women who drank on their birthdays experienced blood alcohol levels of 0.26 or higher, the level at which a person is severely impaired and at risk for choking on vomit or suffering serious injury.

U.K. researchers say that teens who binge drinking can suffer from memory impairment even days after they stop drinking alcohol, the  BBC reported April 3.

Self-reported alcohol-impaired (AI) driving has increased in the United States during the last decade. New findings show that most AI driving is due to binge drinkers rather than heavy or alcohol-dependent drinkers.

The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it's the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors' face planting outside bars or on beaches.

Binge drinking is usually associated with intoxication and being in a large group of people. However, people around the world may have a different perception of what binge drinking consists of.

College students seem to be the most susceptible to binge drinking. Those teens are out of the house, living on their own for the first time and going to parties where alcohol is easily accessible. A 1997 Harvard study showed that two-fifths of college students were binge drinkers, and nearly 20 percent were frequent binge drinkers.

New research into lifelong alcohol consumption reveals that heavy binge drinking by adolescents and young adults is associated with increased long-term risk for heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders. The risk is lower in people who start drinking alcohol later in life and maintain more moderate drinking patterns.

Teenage binge drinkers are significantly more likely to become heavy drinkers as adults and find themselves with a string of criminal convictions, indicates a study carried out by researchers at the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH). [UK]

Sexual victimization can mean several things -- verbal coercion to have sex with an intimate partner, rape by a stranger, a woman fondled in a bar, or forced intercourse when a woman is too intoxicated to consent or object.