nullIf Red Bull gives you wings, as the energy drink’s advertising suggests, what happens when you mix the popular beverage with alcohol? Broken wings, all too often, says a study from Wake Forest University.

Researchers there found that college students who down cocktails of booze and energy drinks, such as Red Bull, run a significantly higher risk of injury compared with students who stick to uncaffeinated alcoholic beverages. The students sucking down Speed Balls, Bullgaritas and Bull Breezes were much more likely to be hurt or injured, to ride with an intoxicated driver or to take advantage of someone else sexually.

“The analogy I like to use is that it’s like stepping on the gas pedal and the brake pedal of a car at the same time,” Mary Claire O’Brien, the lead researcher, told the Health Blog. She presented the findings at a meeting of the American Public Health Association. (We have to admit our headline is just a tweak of the title of her abstract.)

The results follow several studies that found mixing alcohol, a depressant, and caffeine, a stimulant, can make people feel less drunk than they really are.

Energy drinks are wildly popular on college campuses, where companies like Red Bull pay student marketers to come up with creative ways to give the non-alcoholic drinks away. A Red Bull spokeswoman told the Health Blog via email that the company doesn’t promote the drink as a mixer “as this might impair the positive effects” of the drink. Still, it’s fine to mix Red Bull with alcohol “as long as people do not underestimate that alcohol consumption might impair their mental and physical activities,” she wrote.

The Wake Forest study found that 16%, or about 700, of more than 4,300 students surveyed via the Web consume energy drinks mixed with alcohol. A can of Red Bull has about three times the caffeine in a can of Coca-Cola.

Of 2,900 students in the study who had had a drink in the past month, 39% of those who had mixed an energy drink with alcohol had ridden with a drunk driver, compared with 23% of those who had a plain alcoholic drink. More than 12% of students who had consumed an energy drink with alcohol had been hurt or injured, compared with 6% who had consumed a plain alcoholic drink.

O’Brien, associate professor of emergency medicine and public health sciences at Wake Forest, decided to conduct the study after treating a college student who had passed out after a night drinking jacked-up cocktails, including Jäger Bombs, a mix of Red Bull and Jägermeister.

She told us she’s not against energy drinks “anymore than I’m against a cup of coffee.” But she worries the the drinks are marketed too aggressively to young consumers. She pointed to Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Extra (caffeinated, raspberry-flavored beer) which has used the advertising slogan, “Go Home With More Than a Burrito Tonight.” For more about the concerns of mixing energy drinks and alcohol, see this report from the Marin Institute.