According to researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Stanford University, girls who binge-drink, defined as having four or more drinks for women and five or more for men, showed less activity in several brain regions than boys.

“These differences in brain activity were linked to worse performance on other measures of attention and working memory ability,” Stanford University psychiatry professor Susan Tapert, a co-author of the study, said. “This suggests that female teens may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of heavy alcohol use.”

Tapert noted that the reason alcohol could affect teen girls’ brains more than it does their male counterparts’ is because girls’ brains develop one to two years earlier than males’.

Other factors include hormonal differences between girls and boys, and girls’ slower rates of metabolism, higher body fat ratios, and lower body weight.