Colleges concerned about binge drinking may have a bigger problem: students who consume two or three times more than the standard for bingeing, Fox News reported May 24.

'Extreme drinkers' include women who down eight or more drinks at a sitting and men who have 10 or more drinks on a single occasion. Researchers say that such hard-core drinking is not uncommon among college students. A "surprisingly large percentage of students, particularly males, drink at peak levels well beyond the binge threshold," according to Duke University researcher Aaron White, Ph.D., and colleagues.

The researchers administered anonymous surveys to more than 10,000 first-year students at 14 U.S. colleges in 2003, asking respondents how many drinks they had consumed per day in the previous two weeks. They found that about 20 percent of the males reported consuming 10 or more drinks on at least one day, while about 10 percent of women reported drinking 8 or more alcoholic beverages on at least one day. Both figures are double the accepted standard for binge drinking.

Moreover, about 8 percent of men and 2 percent of women reported drinking three times the bingeing standard -- 15 and 12 drinks in a day, respectively. Among the 55 percent of students who reported drinking during the two-week study period, men averaged roughly 6 drinks per sitting, while women had about 4 drinks per occasion.

The study appears in the June 2006 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.