AN eight-year-old girl was declared an alcoholic after she sought help for a "serious" drinking problem at a Scottish support centre.

The child was helped by an alcohol charity in Dundee, northern Scotland, after admitting that she drank regularly, local newspaper The Daily Record reported today.

The girl, who grew up in a family of problem drinkers, was trying to turn her life around after getting support from the Tayside Council on Alcohol, the newspaper said.

Her case highlighted a pattern of childhood drinking in Scotland, where 120 children under 14 were hospitalised for alcohol-related conditions in a single medical district during the past year.

Kathryn Baker, of the Tayside Council for Alcohol, said childhood drinking was setting young Scots up for a lifetime of alcohol addiction.

"These young people not only place themselves at risk as a result of drunken behaviour through unsafe sex, fights, accidents and acute alcohol poisoning but are often laying the foundations for a pattern of heavy drinking, which they follow through into their late teens and beyond," she said.

Originally published as Alcoholic girl, 8, seeks help in Scotland