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Drinking during adolescence not only increases the risks of alcoholism in adults, but can also result in memory impairment, reveals a new study. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Neuroscience and revealed that not only does alcohol consumption increase 15-fold the risk of alcoholism in adults, but also the working memory of the person who begins his teens. The study was conducted on mice, which were allowed to get drunk by drinking voluntarily. Earlier also, the researchers looked at the effects of excessive alcohol consumption on mice, but only by forcing them intoxicated by inhaling steam or injecting alcohol into their systems.
For the study, mice in the same stage of development in adolescence in humans, were selected and then allowed access to alcohol daily. The results showed that patterns of behavior in these mice were similar to those of humans who were exposed to excessive drinking habits during adolescence. As these mice became young adults, those who used to drink a lot of alcohol adopted the same drinking habits as in humans. But the most striking changes have been observed in a set of neurons that are equivalent to the human prefrontal cortex. These neurons, just like the prefrontal cortex in humans, were responsible for working memory and attention in rats.
Working memory is a very short-term memory affecting mice that have been exposed to excessive consumption of alcohol. These affected mice had prefrontal cortex neurons that were less able to generate persistent activity, which appeared to have altered their working memory, according to the research study. The study's lead author, Michael Salling of Columbia University, correlated these effects on brains from mice to effects in adults, explaining that the results of this study explained why adults who had started to drinking during adolescence were suffering from memory problems. Harrison, a professor at Columbia University in New York, said that adolescent brains are at a stage of development where they are likely to be switched to alcohol and excessive consumption of alcohol. alcohol. He added by saying that through this study, researchers had undertaken to look into whether they could find these switches in occasional teen drinkers, so that they could be disabled.
(With IANS entries)
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