Binge drinking in adolescence alters working memory: Study

Parents, take note: If your teenager is drinking alcohol, this can be detrimental to his working memory, suggests a new study. The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, also suggested that teens who are drinking are 15 times more likely to become alcoholics in adulthood.

"The brains of young adolescents are at a stage of development that makes them more vulnerable to being," said co-author Neil Harrison, a professor at Columbia University in New York.

" The question we ask ourselves is, can we find these switches in the drinking teenagers so that we can run it? Harrison added.

Earlier, other researchers examined the neuroscience of excessive alcohol consumption by poisoning mice by inhalation of steam or by injection of alcohol. But for this study, the researchers allowed the mice to drink voluntarily.

In this approach, mice had access to alcohol every other day for a period of their development that equates to human adolescence

. Drinking in adolescent mice was also similar to the effects in humans, and when they became young adults, those who drank heavily in their youth adopted eating habits often seen in people, according to the researchers.

appeared in the neurons of the murine equivalent of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC), involved in the planning of actions by suppressing inappropriate responses and keeping working memory (which governs memory in the very short term) and the attention.

In binge-drinking mice, some PFC neurons were less able to generate persistent activity, and these changes appear to alter the working memory, the researchers said

"These findings may help explain why drinking teenagers teens have memory problems, "noted lead author Michael Salling of Columbia University.