What constitutes an alcohol binge?
April 14th 2008 21:39
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FULL ARTICLE ATTACHED VIA THE LINK
There is controversy about this. Some such as the Journal of Alcohol Studies describe it as an extended period of drinking, over two or more days, during which the person drinks to intoxication and ceases usual activities.
However, the International Centre for Alcohol Policies' definition, five or more drinks for men and four or more for women per occasion, has been commonly used in social science research.
While the US National Advisory Council uses the above definition, it restricts it to occurring over two hours. In the Heffernan study, a binge drinker was defined as a man who drank eight units or a woman who drank six units of alcohol in one session on two or more occasions per week.
How does alcohol affect memory? The infant brain has more tissue (neurones) than it requires and those that are not used die
This pruning of nervous tissue continues into adolescence although then it is more specifically focussed and differs in nature from that seen in childhood.
The frontal lobes of the brain, an area that is concerned with memory, impulse control, judgement and planning undergoes the most intriguing changes.
As in young children, this is determined in part by our interaction with the outside world and results in the brain being sculpted by both internal and external factors.
And one of the environmental factors that is relevant to this process is alcohol. For decades it has been recognised that it caused memory problems such as dementia and confabulation, i.e. the fabrication of stories to fill in memory blanks.
As well as the frontal lobe, the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain, is also concerned with memory and alcohol also disrupts its function. In order to understand this, it is important to know how memory works.
We can all carry out our day-to-day activities without thinking. This is termed working memory. Having read the story, we will remember it for a short period, called short-term memory. We will then forget it unless we continually rehearse what we have read.
Memory for long-term storage is located in the hippocampus and the movement of memory from short to long-term storage requires that the neural (nerve) circuits in the hippocampus change as each new memory is installed.
Alcohol is thought to influence this plasticity in a damaging way in the adolescent brain because of the pre-existing changes that are already in train in the brain.
So the findings of Heffernan's study are a warning, yet again, that teenagers are vulnerable not just to the behavioural effects of alcohol such as violence, sexual assault and car accidents but even the young brain is susceptible.
Patrica Casey is professor of psychiatry at UCD and consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital.
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