Course of Alcohol Symptoms and Social Anxiety Disorder from Adolescence to Young Adulthood

Background: There is limited knowledge of the course of social anxiety disorder (SAD) from adoles-cence into adulthood, and how SAD and alcohol use disorder (AUD) symptoms change together over time. The current study examined how persistent and adolescent-limited SAD relate to alcohol symp-tom trajectories across adolescence and into adulthood, as well as gender differences in the course of SAD and AUD symptoms. Methods: Participants were 788 youth (ages 12 to 18 at the baseline assessment; 46.2 % female; 80.5 % White) recruited from the community (n = 220) and from clinical programs (n = 568). Youth completed clinical interviews on their lifetime history of AUD symptoms and SAD at baseline and were followed through age 25. Multivariate polynomial growthmixture modeling was used to estimate devel-opmental trajectories for SAD and AUD symptoms separately, then together in a dual trajectory model. Gender differences were examined using a classify–analyze approach