Texts from the emergency room may dissuade young adults from drinking excessively, according to a recent study.

Researchers found that young adults who screened positive for a history of hazardous or binge drinking educed their binge drinking by more than 50 percent after receiving mobile phone text messages following a visit to the emergency department, according to a study published online yesterday in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Hazardous drinking is defined as five or more drinks per day for men and four or more drinks per day for women.

"Each day in the [United States], more than 50,000 adults ages 18 to 24 visit ERs and up to half have hazardous alcohol use patterns," researcher Brian Suffoletto said in a statement. "More than a third of them report alcohol abuse or dependence. The emergency department provides a unique setting to screen young adults for drinking problems and to engage with them via their preferred mode of communication to reduce future use."

For the study, researchers enrolled 765 young adult emergency patients with a history of hazardous drinking in the study. For 12 weeks, one-third received text messages prompting them to respond to drinking-related queries and received text messages in return offering feedback on their answers. The feedback was tailored to strengthen their low-risk drinking plan or goal or to promote reflection on either their drinking plan or their decision not to set a low-risk goal. One-third received only text message queries about their drinking and one-third received no text messages.

Researchers found that the group receiving both text message queries and feedback decreased their self-reported binge drinking days by 51 percent and decreased the number of self-reported drinks per day by 31 percent. The groups that received only text messages or no text messages increased the number of binge drinking days.

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that excessive alcohol consumption, including binge drinking, is responsible for 10 percent of deaths among working-age adults in the United States.

"Illicit drugs and opiates grab all the headlines, but alcohol remains the fourth leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.," Suffoletto said. "If we can intervene in a meaningful way in the health and habits of people when they are young, we could make a real dent in that tragic statistic. Alcohol may bring them to the ER, but we can do our part to keep them from becoming repeat visitors."

The findings were recently published in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine.