While binge drinking is generally described as having four drinks at one occasion for women and five drinks for men, extreme drinking is much more excessive. 

Extreme drinking doubles or even triples those minimum amounts, notes Aaron White PhD, who works in Duke University Medical Center’s psychiatry department and directed the study which measured drinking trend’s on American college campuses.

According to an article on WebMD, White’s team studied data from an online survey of 10,424 first-year students at 14 unnamed U.

S. colleges. The students took the surveys in 2003 before taking an alcohol education and prevention course. The students reported how many drinks they’d had each day for the two previous weeks. Their answers were anonymous.

Alarmingly, the survey showed that very large numbers of students, particularly males, engaged in very heavy drinking.  The findings are outlined as follows:

--1 in 5 men reported drinking 10 or more drinks on at least one day (double men’s binge-drinking threshold).
--1 in 10 women reported drinking 8 or more drinks on at least one day (double women’s binge-drinking threshold).
--Nearly 8 percent of men reported drinking 15 or more drinks on at least one day (triple men’s binge-drinking threshold).
--Nearly 2 percent of women reported drinking 12 or more drinks on at least one day (triple women’s binge-drinking threshold).

In addition, those who passed the extreme drinking level were most likely to have had a similar extreme drinking experience within the last 2 weeks.  In total, about 55 percent of all students who took the survey reported drinking alcohol in the two weeks before the survey but not to the extreme level.