Category: Alcohol

The study found thinning in areas of the brain important for memory, language, awareness, consciousness and attention.

Binge drinking of alcohol is linked to brain damage in young people, research finds.

Binge drinking is defined in the US as four or more standard alcoholic drinks for women or five or more for men in two hours.

Using alcohol in this way was linked to thinning in areas of the brain important for memory, language, awareness, consciousness and attention.

For example, binge drinking is associated with problems learning new words in young people.

This research backs up studies that have also linked moderate alcohol intake in adults to brain damage.

Moderate intake is defined in the US as between 7 and 10 standard drinks per week.

Here are examples of one standard drink in the US:

Dr Anita Cservenka, who led the study, said:

“Adolescence is a time when the brain still matures including not only biological development but also maturation of psychosocial behaviours.

Given the increase of binge and heavy drinking in young people, understanding the effects of consuming large quantities of alcohol on neural development and the impact on cognitive skills is very important.”

The conclusions come from a review of studies on the link between alcohol and brain damage.

Along with thinner brains, binge drinkers also have worse memories, the studies found.

Dr Cservenka explained:

“We looked at six areas to determine the deleterious impact of heavy drinking on brain response, namely: response inhibition, working memory, verbal learning and memory, decision making and reward processing, alcohol cue reactivity, and socio-cognitive/socio-emotional processing.”

Dr Cservenka said:

“These brain alterations, as a result of heavy alcohol use during adolescence and young adulthood, could result in increased risk of developing an alcohol use disorder later on in life.

It is therefore important to continue raising awareness of the risks of binge drinking and to promote future research in this area.

Our review provides a useful basis to determine the areas that require further attention.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Cservenka & Brumback, 2017).

Is drinking a small glass of wine or half a pint of beer a day be good for you?

Some studies have suggested that daily consumption of low-volume alcoholic drinks such as a glass of wine could lower heart disease and death from any cause.

In contrast, new evidence shows that light drinking does not bring any health benefits.

The review also shows that higher consumption levels of alcohol dramatically increases the risk of heart disease and death.

In the United States, one “standard” drink contains nearly 14 grams of pure alcohol, equivalent to a glass of wine at 12 percent alcohol (150 ml), a bottle of beer at 5 percent alcohol (355 ml), or one shot of hard liquor such as whisky, vodka, gin, and rum.

Dr Tim Stockwell, the study’s co-author, said:

“Low-level or moderate drinking is roughly defined between one drink per week and two drinks per day.

That’s the amount of alcohol that many studies, if you look at them uncritically, suggest reduces your risk of dying prematurely.”

But the results from those studies have been influenced by some biases so after adjusting for them:

“…the appearance of the benefit from moderate drinking greatly diminishes and, in some cases, vanishes altogether.”

The review analysed 107 studies examining the association between consumption of alcohol and death.

Dr Stockwell explained:

“This is an overview of a lot of really bad studies.

There’s a lot of confounding and bias in these studies, and our analysis illustrates that.”

Former-drinker bias

A common flaw for those studies was that they included former drinkers in the non-drinkers group.

But it is well-known that if a former drinker has stopped drinking or reduced alcohol intake, it is often because of some health issues.

When compared to abstainers, former drinkers are at a higher risk of early death by 22 percent.

Dr Stockwell said:

“We’ve put Band-Aids on all of these bad studies to try and explore how these different characteristics result in the appearance of health benefits.”

Their analysis reveals that occasional drinking (9 g of alcohol per week) or light drinking (less than 24 g a day; one or two drinks a day) didn’t reduce the likelihood of death.

There was a slight increased risk of death among those who drank more than two a day (25 g to 44 g of alcohol per day).

The risk of death was greatly increased among heavy drinkers (45 g or more of alcohol per day).

Dr Catherine Lesko from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said:

“There’s this question about whether low-level drinking is beneficial, and I think I’d take this to mean that it’s really not particularly beneficial.

I don’t know that it’s harmful, very low-level drinking.

But a lot of the results are reinforcing the harmful effects of even moderate to high level drinking.”

Drinking even at lower amounts caused more dramatic effect on women’s health than men.

Ms Patricia Aussem, a counsellor at Partnership to End Addiction, explained:

“Women experience alcohol differently than men because of biological factors.

Even when drinking the same amount of alcohol, women will have higher blood alcohol levels, feel intoxicated more quickly and take longer to metabolize it.”

Furthermore, binge drinking increase the odds of car accidents, homicides, suicides, as well as cardiovascular disease, cancer, liver disease, and stroke.

Some consequences of lifetime drinking:

• You are more likely to escape harm when having 2 drinks or less per week.
• You are more prone to develop some forms of cancer such as colon or breast cancer when having more than 3 standard drinks per week.
• You are much more likely to develop heart disease or stroke when having 7 standard drinks per week.

Ms Aussem said:

“Each additional standard drink radically increases the risk of alcohol-related consequences.

These risks increase in lockstep with consumption as it is more difficult to repair the damage done to cell tissue in the body and brain.

Simply put, less is better.

Any steps to cut back can be helpful in terms of reducing the risks of alcohol-related cancers and cardiovascular disease.”

The study was published in JAMA Network Open (Zhao et al., 2023).

New brain cells in the hippocampus — an area critical for memory — were reduced by 40%.

Even moderate alcohol intake could reduce the brain’s ability to produce new cells by 40 percent, research suggests.

Regularly having as little as 3 to 4 alcoholic drinks could reduce the structural integrity of the adult brain.

Ms Megan Anderson, the study’s first author, said:

“Moderate drinking can become binge drinking without the person realizing it.

In the short term there may not be any noticeable motor skills or overall functioning problems, but in the long term this type of behavior could have an adverse effect on learning and memory.”

The conclusions come from a rodent study in which the animals were given the equivalent amount of alcohol to reach the legal driving limit.

This amount of alcohol did not have much effect on their motor coordination.

However, the results showed that the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus — an area critical for memory — were reduced by 40%.

Ms Anderson said:

“…this substantial decrease in brain cell numbers over time could have profound effects on the structural plasticity of the adult brain because these new cells communicate with other neurons to regulate brain health.

If this area of your brain was affected every day over many months and years, eventually you might not be able to learn how to get somewhere new or to learn something new about your life.

It’s something that you might not even be aware is occurring.”

Drinker who are ‘at risk’ are currently defined as men who have 14 drinks per week or more and women who have 7 or more per week.

Ms Anderson said:

“This research indicates that social or daily drinking may be more harmful to brain health than what is now believed by the general public.”

The study was published in the journal Neuroscience (Anderson et al., 2012).

The more alcohol people drank, the greater the damage to the cerebral cortex.

High alcohol intake can lead to a thinner cerebral cortex, research finds.

The cerebral cortex is the layer of neurons that supports most higher-level cognition.

However, the brain damage caused by drinking is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon.

The more people drank, the greater the damage to this area of the brain.

The irony is that alcohol damages the very areas of the brain that are responsible for controlling alcohol intake.

However, people who had been alcoholics but now abstained showed the brain can recover.

Dr Catherine Brawn Fortier, the study’s first author, said:

“We now know that alcohol has wide ranging effects across the entire cortex and in structures of the brain that contribute to a wide range of psychological abilities and intellectual functions.”

Alcohol affects both the gray and white matter in the brain.

The greatest impact, though, is seen in the temporal lobes.

Dr Fortier explained:

“These brain areas are critical to learning new information and, even more importantly, in self-regulation, impulse control, and the modification of all complicated human behaviors.

In other words, the very parts of the brain that may be most important for controlling problem drinking are damaged by alcohol, and the more alcohol consumed, the greater the damage.”

How alcohol affects the cerebral cortex study

The conclusions come from brain scans of 65 people, some of whom were recovering alcoholics and others who were nonalcoholics.

Dr Fortier explained the study’s results:

“First, the outermost layer of cortex across the entire brain was reduced in our sample of recovered alcoholics.

Second, alcohol’s effect on the brain is continuous across a wide range of drinking behavior and appears to be dose specific.

Pathology is often thought of as occurring as an all-or-none phenomenon — you either have brain damage or you don’t.

This study shows that the damage occurs in gradations, and the more you drink, the greater the damage.”

Dr Fortier concluded:

“A widespread reduction in cortical tissue in recovered alcoholics indicates that even with abstinence, cognitive abilities are compromised in former drinkers.

Severe reductions in frontal brain regions can result in a dramatic change to personality and behavior, taking the form of impulsivity, difficulty with self-monitoring, planning, reasoning, poor attention span, inability to alter behavior, a lack of awareness of inappropriate behavior, mood changes, even aggression.

Severe reductions in temporal brain regions most often result in impairments in memory and language function.”

The study was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (Fortier et al., 2011).