The Cost of Underage Drinking

Binge drinking is a common, observable phenomenon amongst US and UK cultures, although presented under different circumstances. The US has had a tumultuous relationship with alcohol— the Prohibition movement in the 1920s to 30s found itself to be ineffective; even with alcohol bans and restrictions, the US government could not stop the people of America from having a little tipple after work. As a result of the ineffective ban on alcohol, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed. No one over 21 would be able to legally ingest alcohol. Such a restriction, again, proves itself to not work. The thrill and taboo of underage drinking attracts many teenagers and young adults under 21 where drinking is commonly encouraged by peers in social settings, commonly during parties where binge drinking is prevalent. The circumstances in which drinking is encouraged is much more different in the UK, where teenagers as young as 16 can drink and are allowed to purchase at the age of 18. Like the US, a lot of the drinks consumed are done so under the guise of socializing. Paired with popular media that glamorizes drinking culture, this deadly combination only exacerbates the problem of underage drinking. What does this mean for those who do drink underage? There exists an underlying degenerative effect that can be observed in multiple tests.

 In a study published by Dr. Jamie D. Roitman et al, a population of adolescent rats were given access to alcohol in gelatin form to simulate a situation that encouraged a “binge-like pattern of consumption” (Roitman et al., 2016). They were then tested to see what their chances of risk taking were, by gambling on different levers that produced a reward on pre-programmed chance. In the presence of uncertainty, the experimenters found that when the rats consumed more alcohol, the more they preferred the lever with the greater risk attached. The neural responses-- or lack thereof—were just as interesting, however, and proposes some possibly scary implications for human adolescents. When measuring responses in the prefrontal cortex, they discovered that neurons fired less in general, and had a dampened response to rewards when compared to the control that did not consume alcohol. In a similar study done by Michael C. Sailing and colleagues published in 2017, they found that mice that had consumed alcohol or voluntarily took part in binge drinking in their adolescence had deficits in working memory, where the corresponding neurons in the prefrontal cortex had reduced firing ability, much akin to the results seen in Roitman’s experiment.

We can also see these parallels in decreased cortical activation in humans as well as rodents. In the UK, Laurel S. Morris and her colleagues explored the effects of binge drinking-- not on rodent brains, but on human ones, where neural differences between binge drinkers and non binge drinkers are easier to tell from rodent brains.In their studies, they found disturbances in axonal and dendritic connections implicated in attentional functioning and motivation. Adolescents who drank alcohol, over time, showed reduction in grey matter density in the right middle frontal gyrus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This reduction also interferes with critical neurodevelopmental growth with changes that they carry on into adulthood, such as a propensity for alcohol consumption, higher rates of addiction, and faultier working memory. 

What does this mean for today’s youth? Doctors discourage underage drinking not because they do not care about the patient’s social life, but that the the effects of alcohol are undeniably adverse to a still-growing brain. If we have learned anything from the Prohibition, it is that we cannot stop people from drinking altogether. However, extensive education of both adults and their children should be sufficient for preventing potentially irreversible neural damage that drinking has on underdeveloped brains. Binge drinking even during late teens still comes with its undesired effects, and a larger social intervention will be necessary if drinking culture in the US and the UK continues as it is today.

References:

Mcmurray, Matthew Stephen, et al. “Consequences of Adolescent Ethanol Consumption on Risk Preference and Orbitofrontal Cortex Encoding of Reward.” Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 41, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1366–1375., doi:10.1038/npp.2015.288.

Morris, Laurel S., et al. “Binge Drinking Differentially Affects Cortical and Subcortical Microstructure.” The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Wiley-Blackwell, 20 Jan. 2017, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/adb.12493.

Salling, Michael C., et al. “Alcohol Consumption during Adolescence in a Mouse Model of Binge Drinking Alters the Intrinsic Excitability and Function of the Prefrontal Cortex through a Reduction in the Hyperpolarization-Activated Cation Current.” Journal of Neuroscience, Society for Neuroscience, 18 June 2018, www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2018/06/18/JNEUROSCI.0550-18.2018.

“The Law on Alcohol and under 18s.” Is Alcohol Harming Your Stomach | Drinkaware, www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/alcohol-and-the-law/the-law-on-alcohol-and-under-18s/.