Alcohol knocks teen brain off growth trajectory

Puzzle and Brain Games

July 10th, 2006 |

This is truly a must-know piece information for any high-school or college student. To place the severity of the problem in perspective:

75% of students have tried alcohol by the end of high school
More than half of 12th graders and 20% of 5th graders have been drunk at least once (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2004 study)

A brand new study, along with other recent studies, shows something very alarming: We are learning that the teenage brain is still in the process of developing, and alcohol has a profound ability-much more so than we ever thought- to cause major, permanent brain injury.

"There is no doubt about it now: There are long-term cognitive consequences to excessive drinking of alcohol in adolescence," said Aaron White, an assistant research professor at Duke University. "We definitely didn’t know five or 10 years ago that alcohol affected the teen brain differently. Now there’s a sense of urgency. It’s the same place we were in when everyone realized what a bad thing it was for pregnant women to drink alcohol."

Recent studies indicate that alcohol likes to target the hippocampus and the frontal lobes in adolescent brains.

The hippocampus is crucial for memory processes
The frontal lobes are important for almost all higher brain functions, including problem solving, judgment, and language ability

A similarly themed post that shows tobacco can similarly prevent the teenage brain from developing properly

Another post talks about how marijuana can do much more harm to the teenage brain than the adult brain

All in all, recent research surprisingly shows that adolescent brains are still developing, and highly susceptible to being knocked off course by common substances. Wonder if caffeine will soon be added to the list…

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5 Responses to “Alcohol knocks teen brain off growth trajectory”

RMW | Guest May 24th, 2007 - 2:45 pm

From the story linked to in the piece: "The most alarming evidence of physical damage comes from federally financed laboratory experiments on the brains of adolescent rats subjected to binge doses of alcohol." While it is certainly an issue worthy of our attention, the effects of alcohol on young human brains cannot be reliably established by animal studies. That is not at all to say that binge drinking in human adolescents is harmless, but the evidence presented in this study is insufficient to draw a conclusion of irreversible damage being the result.
Dr. R.L. Kaplan | Profile (beta) May 24th, 2007 - 3:58 pm

Hi RMW- Thanks for stopping by.

While certain things can not be reliably established by animal studies, some actually can.

A human brain and rat brain have an awful lot in common. Enough so to say that the basic processes affected by alcohol as discussed in the above article probably apply to both brains.

Big corporations like to make similar arguments about toxins & chemicals their products give off- "Chemical XYZ has never been shown to lead to birth defects in humans". Well true, but when the drug causes birth defects in every single animal it’s been tested on, you can bet almost anything it’ll be doing the same in humans….

By the way, I enjoyed your article ‘Escaping the Abattoir‘.
RMW | Guest May 24th, 2007 - 8:50 pm

Thank you, Dr. Kaplan. I enjoy your site a great deal. It’s been a feature on my Google home page for some weeks now. Thank you, also, for taking the time to read that article on my blog.

I definitely agree with you that much can be learned about the pharmacological effects of various substances in humans by examining the effects in rat brains. (And touché to your point: Mine is indeed an argument frequently paraded out by the big-time chemical pushers; there is a stink of guilt by association there.) But while I believe the rat brain can be an effective in vivo brain model to demonstrate the organic effects of a substance, I am less ready to accept the behavioral or developmental parallels. The overwhelming complexity of the human brain as compared to that of the rat enables humans to recover from seemingly catastrophic injuries, with even specialized tasks reassigned to parts of the brain traditionally unfamiliar with those tasks. The so-called lower animals demonstrate some such resiliency, but they are not faced with the need to reassign and relearn tasks as complex as, say, speech. Also, does the adolescent rat serve as an accurate model of the adolescent human to the same degree that the adult rat does for the adult human?

While there may be frightful neuronal consequences to binge drinking (post-binge excitotoxicity being one of them), I am not as certain that the developmental effects will be comparable to the rat’s experience. That said, the rat experiment is still enough to convince me that binge drinking by adolescents is a terrible idea, even if the possible consequences aren’t as obvious.

Keep up the great work on the site!

—Romann
rsmg | Profile (beta) January 5th, 2008 - 10:14 am

Forgive me, for I am new here. This information is vaguely familiar, (writing this now on January 5, 2008), and I wouldn’t question it. Indeed, I wonder if it’s customary, here, to offer any references for such information being posted. It might just be helpful to those of us wishing to further research the matter. –Thank you!
RK | Profile (beta) January 5th, 2008 - 11:43 am

Hi rsmg-

Starting in late 2006, I tried to include more references in the brain health posts. Of course, now the site is more puzzle focused, but when I do put up a brain health-type post, I try to make sure its well referenced.

Thanks