Effects of Alcohol Abuse on the Developing Teenage Brain

Effects of Alcohol Abuse on the Developing Teenage Brain

It’s no secret that teenagers in the United States drink alcohol. Some go as far as abusing this toxic substance. There are a wide variety of factors that influence a teenager to drink. The most common is peer pressure. Teenages take part in drinking with friends at high school parties because they don’t want to feel left out. Another factor is when they watch popular TV shows that encourage such behavior. TV shows show the highlights that come with drinking such as dancing to fun music, flirting, and playing games. The other factor is an escape from their reality. Teens might have a rough home life or they are stressed from pressure to do well in school so they use alcohol to self-medicate. The huge flaw in all of this is that teenagers are misinformed or unaware about the dangers of alcohol. They know the basic dangers like getting alcohol poisoning if they drink too much, but they don’t know the effects on their still developing brain.

In Dr. Jamie Rointman’s article, “Consequences of Adolescent Ethanol Consumption on Risk Preference and Orbitofrontal Cortex Encoding of Reward,” she talks about alcohol consumption as a teenager can have altering effects on the prefrontal cortex. To summarize how they conducted an experiment to test this, they used adolescent rats to record and measure their risk preference after given alcohol in the form of gelatin. The rats would be given a choice of levers to press down on which would yield a reward.  The risk increased the more they pressed on the levers. To summarize Dr. Rointman’s findings, compared to the rat’s who did not consume alcohol, the one who did had less neuronal activity in the prefrontal cortex.

To come full circle, it turns out that when rats are stressed they drink more. Sound familiar? In an article called, “ Effects of stress on alcohol drinking: a review of animal studies”, Dr. Becker conducts an experiment where individual rats are held in small tubes for certain periods of time in order to induce stress. They are given sugar water with alcohol and regular water. A significant amount of the alcohol water was consumed by the stressed rats while the control group drank the regular water normally.

Dr. Rointman’s study showed how the prefrontal cortex in rat brains can be damaged if alcohol was consumed during their early years, while Dr. Becker’s article explained how an increase in stress can lead rats to drink more alcohol. For human adolescents, it is at the utmost importance to provide them with the proper education on these two subjects. They need to know that the effects of alcohol abuse is not temporary, but they good news is that it can be controlled. If teens know healthy coping mechanisms for stress it will decrease their need to use alcohol. They will be able live a happy life and grow into a fully functioning adult.

References:

Becker HC, Lopez MF, Doremus-Fitzwater TL. Effects of stress on alcohol drinking: a review of animal studies. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2011;218(1):131-56.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3247761/

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/