It has become known that a person’s brain continues to develop through adolescence and into early adulthood. This makes our teenage years very interesting, to say the least. Teenagers are known to be risk-takers and act impulsively. Adults often look back on their teenage years and make remarks such as “I cannot believe I did that”. The saying “young and dumb” actually has some scientific proof to back it up, but can what we do as teenagers really impact our behaviors and even personalities as adults? It is logical to think that what we introduce to our brain before it is fully developed could have an actual impact on it, and it turns out, that is exactly what happens.
It is no secret that teenagers consume alcohol. Even in the United States where the drinking age is 21 it is well known that oftentimes that law is ignored by a large population of teenagers. What some automatically worry about with the thought of underage drinking includes the children getting themselves in trouble, making bad choices while intoxicated, or making the drinking into a habit. What Dr. Jamie Roitman has found is that we have more to worry about than that when it comes to adolescent consumption of alcohol.
In “Consequences of Adolescent Ethanol Consumption on Risk Preference and Orbitofrontal Cortex Encoding of Reward,” Dr. Jamie Roitman used rats to examine the long-term effects of consuming alcohol during the process of brain development. She focused on neuronal responses in the orbitofrontal cortex (location in the brain for decision making based on outcome value and reward expectations). Focusing on this, she could look at whether alcohol consumption during adolescence could affect risk taking and decision making during the time of adulthood. What she did was feed the rats gelatin that contained alcohol during their adolescence. She followed them into adulthood and recorded their electrophysiological activity of certain neurons in their orbitofrontal cortex. What she found was that rats that had a higher alcohol intake had a higher preference for risky tasks than the rats of the control group. She also found that rats that consumed alcohol during their adolescence grew up to experience blunted neuron firing rates following rewards meaning that the alcohol affected their decision making based on the reward process.
It is thought, by some, that parents that allow their children to drink alcohol under their supervision would lead to safe and responsible alcohol consumption. We often times hear parents say “Well I’d rather they do it with me than without me”. Science may have proven that this thought is misguided. A news report published in Ireland explains that it has been found that adolescents that have parental permission to drink alcohol are far more likely to experience harm. Multiple studies have been done that say that adolescents with parents that are okay with them drinking alcohol are four times more likely to engage in dangerous drinking habits. The news article also mentions that there is proof of these teenagers being more likely to involve themselves in behaviors such as vandalism and fighting and even engage in risky sexual behaviors.
The findings by Dr. Roitman as well as the ones explained in the news article lead to one conclusion: teenagers should not be consuming alcohol. Not only has it been proven to affect their behaviors during adolescence, but also carry on into their adulthood! The teenage brain can be easily influenced, simply because of the fact that it is still developing. We need to be more aware of the effects of alcohol and promote holding off the drinking, at least until the legal age.
Works Cited
McMurray MS, Amodeo LR, Roitman JD. Consequences of
Adolescent Ethanol Consumption on Risk Preference and Orbitofrontal Cortex
Encoding of Reward. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2015;41(5):1366-75.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4793121/
Hilliard, Mark. “Teens Allowed to Drink Alcohol by Parents Far More Likely to Suffer Harm.” The Irish Times, The Irish Times, 19 Nov. 2018
www.irishtimes.com/news/health/teens-allowed-to-drink-alcohol-by-parents-far-more-likely-to-suffer-harm-1.3703302.
No comments:
Post a Comment