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The chances of teenagers including alcohol in their life or discarding it will all depend on who served them the very first drink of their life, according to a recent study.

The research was led by a team from the University of Iowa and was published in Pediatrics.

The study shows that when the first drink has been given by close friends, it made teenagers more prone to accept alcohol as a part of their daily life sooner, and as time passes, these teenagers had higher possibilities of abusing alcohol when they grow older. This study aims at abolishing the alcohol-related issues from its basic level.

According to a study done by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health in 2011, out of 20,000 students studied, one-third of the eighth graders had drunk alcohol. This equation increases to more than 50 percent by the time they are in 10th grade and is a huge 70 percent by senior year.

"When you start drinking, even with kids who come from alcoholic families, they don't get their first drinks from their family. They get their first drinks from their friends. They have to be able to get it. If they have friends who have alcohol, then it's easier for them to have that first drink. There's something driving kids to drink. Maybe it's the coolness factor or some mystique about it. So, we're trying to educate kids about the risks associated with drinking and give them alternatives," Samuel Kuperman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, was quoted as saying in Medicalxpress.

The study also found that a teenager was most vulnerable if he/she had a best friend who along with drinking, also had regular access to alcohol. In such cases, the chances of these teenagers drinking also doubled.

"Family history doesn't necessarily drive the age of first drink. It's access. At that age (14 or 15) access trumps all. As they get older, then family history plays a larger role. We're trying to separate out those who experiment with alcohol to those who go on to problematic drinking," Kuperman added.