Researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, U.S., established that binge-drinking in youngsters does not cause hangovers alone but affects the brain, too, with irreversible damage.
Binge-drinking is consuming large amounts of alcohol within a short period of time.
The Telegraph quoted study-colleague Dr. Chitra Mandyam, as saying, “Binge alcohol consumption in adolescents is increasing, and studies in animal models show that adolescence is a period of high vulnerability to brain insults.”
Research details
Researchers conducted the study on adolescent rhesus macaques monkeys for a period of 11 months.
For the study, they gave large amounts of tangy citrus alcoholic drink to seven adolescent monkeys. They increased this amount from one to six percent over a period of 40 days.
Four monkeys of this group were made to continue having the strong cocktail for an hour each day over the next 11 months.
The other three monkeys were put on a non-alcoholic version of beverage to arrive at comparative results.
Finally, all the monkeys went tee-total for the last two months of the trial.
Study results
Analysis revealed that monkeys consuming alcohol continually produced fewer brain cells and reportedly suffered more brain damage to the hippocampus.
The hippocampus, a major component of the brain in humans and other mammals, plays a vital role in long-term memory and spatial navigation (the process of reading and controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle).
Study-collaborator Michael Taffe found that even after two months of total abstinence, monkeys’ hippocampus had fewer signs of fresh, immature neurons.
The worst part was, stated Taffe, that there were indications that the existing supply had begun to deteriorate.
Conversely, the control group of teetotal monkeys produced healthy, fresh neurons in the hippocampus with no visible sign of neural death.
Researchers noted that binge-drinking had similar damaging effects on the brains of adolescents.
Mandyam was quoted in The Telegraph as saying, “In the monkeys, alcohol ‘significantly decreased’ the number of actively dividing cells, demonstrating the teenage hippocampus is particularly sensitive to its damaging effect.”
“This lasting effect, observed two months after alcohol discontinuation, may underlie the deficits in hippocampus-associated cognitive tasks that are observed in alcoholics,” added the reasercher.
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