Binge Drinking Harms Memory; Riskier for Teen Girls

Alcohol, when consumed immoderately, hits brain regions that enable functions such as learning, memory, and reasoning, with teen girls being more vulnerable to the harms of binge drinking than their male counterparts, two recent studies found.

Binge drinking can block vital receptors in the brain leading to production of steroids that hinder some key brain functions, neuroscientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discovered.

The research, recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that excessive intake of alcohol affects the hippocampus, a major component of brain, and other regions of the brain that are critical to cognitive functions such as consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

The researchers, who carried out experiments on slices of the brains of rats exposed to alcohol, explained the blockage of vital receptors in the brain produces steroids which weaken long-term potentiation (LTP), which is enhancement of signal transmission between neurons enabling learning and memory.

“It takes a lot of alcohol to block LTP and memory. But the mechanism isn’t straightforward. The alcohol triggers these receptors to behave in seemingly contradictory ways, and that’s what actually blocks the neural signals that create memories,” study senior investigator Dr. Charles F. Zorumski said in a statement. This explains, he added, why individuals who get drunk often don’t remember what they did the night before.

However, there is no proof yet of alcohol damaging brain cells, Zorumski added. “As a matter of fact, even at the high levels we used here, we don’t see any changes in how the brain cells communicate. You still process information… You haven’t passed out. But you’re not forming new memories.”

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