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If you are an excessive drinker, then your parents are probably to blame.
Research has suggested that those of us who tend to overdo on a Friday night could have a new excuse – this is inherent to our genes.
While it's easy to associate an intense alcohol session with a lack of willpower, scientists now claim that we could be more genetically predisposed to fall into such habits.
We already know that alcohol forces the brain to want more because it causes the release of dopamine, the "reward chemical," in the neurons of the ventral tegmental region (VTA) of the brain.
Researchers at the Epigenetics Alcohol Research Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a channel in the VTA, called KCNK13, which is blocked by alcohol and which causes the release of dopamine by neurons.
She thought it was a genetic trait that parents passed on to their children.
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Scientists have also discovered that some people naturally have fewer KCNK13 channels, which means that they need to drink more alcohol to feel a similar pleasure and so they are more likely to consume more calories. l & # 39; alcohol.
To test their theory, scientists drank mice.
In some of the creatures, they genetically reduced the KCNK13 channel by 15% in their brains compared to normal mice.
Mice whose brain was altered drank up to 30% more than normal mice.
Another test that observed the neuronal response to alcohol in the VTA region revealed that mice deprived of KCNK13 were 50% less sensitive to alcohol in their system.
Professor Mark Brodie, who conducted the study published in the journal Neuropharmacology, said: "If any one naturally has lower levels of this channel, he will have to drink a lot more to produce the pleasing effects of the Alcohol, and may be at higher risk of excessive occasional drinking disorder of alcohol.
"We believe that mice with less KCNK13 in the VTA drank more alcohol to get the same reward as normal mice."
He added that it was "probably because alcohol triggered the release of less dopamine in the brain".
According to NHS guidelines, excessive consumption of alcohol is defined, for both men and women, as a consumption of more than six units of alcohol per session.
This equates to about three glasses of wine or three liters of beer.
This is not an exact definition, as everyone's tolerance may depend on their size, weight and experience.
If you want to know how much you drink in one night, use the Drinkaware unit calculator.
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