Scientists have found evidence of brain damage in adolescents and young adults who binge drink, according to a new study.

University of Cincinnati researchers conducted high-resolution brain scans on a sample of 29 people, aged 18 to 25, who reported binge drinking on the weekends.

They found that binge drinking – consuming four or more drinks for females and five or more drinks for males – was linked to cortical thinning of the pre-frontal cortex.

The pre-frontal cortex is the area of the brain related to executive functioning such as paying attention, planning and making decisions, processing emotions and controlling impulses that may otherwise lead to irrational behavior.

The greater the number of drinks a person drank in one sitting, the more likely a person was to have some cortical thinning in the brain, the researchers said.

“Alcohol might be neurotoxic to the neuron cells, or, since the brain is developing in one’s 20s, it could be interacting with developmental factors and possibly altering the ways in which the brain is still growing,” explained lead researcher Tim McQueeny, a doctoral student in the UC Department of Psychology.

Conversely, the researchers found that abstinence of drinking, or even less drinking, could lead to some recovery of brain matter.

The findings affect a significant population, the researchers said. Statistics from the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicate that 42 percent of young American adults between 18 and 25 have engaged in binge drinking.

McQueeny will present the findings this week at the 34^th annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism in Atlanta.

Prior research has indicated that alcoholism can be genetic, but what’s the actual “trigger” that sets the disease off among people with drinking genes?

A new study finds that people who have alcoholic parents drink substantially more when exposed to stressful situations.

In the study, researchers divided 58 healthy people into two groups based on whether they had a family history of alcoholism or not. The people in both groups were then randomly assigned to one of two situations, one of which induced stress.

The groups were subsequently allowed to drink alcohol or a placebo, depending on which situation they had been assigned to.

“The results showed that people with parents who have a history of alcohol abuse drink more than others when exposed to stress,” said Anna Gordh, study researcher.

The researchers say it’s important for children of alcoholics to take note of their response to stress, because if the first instinct is to turn to the bottle, then there may be a serious underlying problem.

Alcoholics’ children are already twice as likely than others to have a drinking problem in the future, and it is important not to exacerbate that risk by drinking excessively in the face of stress, the researchers said.

“If alcohol relaxes you when you’re stressed, then you should try to find other ways of calming yourself down – relaxation exercises, for example,” said Gordh.

The study was published in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behaviour.

Call it a generational gap?

New data indicates that people born after World War II are more likely to binge drink and develop alcoholism.

The research, in particular, points to women at being increasingly at risk for alcohol abuse issues.

Additionally, while the trend was particularly strong in the United States, it was not evident at all in Australia and Western Europe.

The review is one of the first to compile data from individual studies on alcohol use disorders and provide evidence that problem drinking among young women is still increasing, an important finding for public health professionals to take into account.

Because of differences in body size and composition, a woman will become more intoxicated than a man consuming the same quantity of alcohol. Women who drink heavily are also at greater risk of sexual violence and chronic diseases than men.

Based on the results, the researchers recommend that specific prevention and intervention policies be developed to target young women specifically.

The study will be published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

It was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

An antioxidant may prevent damage to the liver caused by excessive alcohol, according to a new study.

University of Alabama researchers believe their findings may pave the way for treatments that could reverse steatosis, or fatty deposits in the liver, that lead to cirrhosis and cancer.

The antioxidant is called mitochondria-targeted ubiquinone, or MitoQ.  Researchers administered it to rats that were given alcohol every day for five to six weeks in an amount sufficient to mirror excessive intake in a human.

Chronic alcoholics typically expierence a build up of fat in the liver cells.  When alcohol is metabolized in the liver, it creates free radicals that prevent the liver’s mitochondria cells from using sufficient amounts of oxygen to produce energy.  This protomotes the formation of fatty deposites that can cause cirrhosis.

Lead researcher Victor Darley-Usmar, Ph.D., professor of pathology at UAB, and his team say that the antioxidant MitoQ is able to intercept and neutralize free radicals before they can damage the mitochondria.  This, of course, prevents the cascade of effects that ultimately leads to disease.

If proven effective in humans, MitoQ would be the first treatment of its kind able to prevent, or even reverse, the damaging effects of alcoholism on the liver.  The antioxidant has already been shown to decrease liver damage in hepatitis C patients.

Alcohol abuse costs $185 billion annually in the United States and 2 million people have some form of alcoholic liver disease, according to statistics from the Annals of Heptology. 90 percent of cirrhosis of the liver and 30 percent of liver cancer is related to alcohol abuse.

The study was published in the journal Heptology.

Parents pass a number of traits onto their children such as height, temperament or eye color.  A new study suggests parents also may be passing on a risk of alcoholism.

Researchers have discovered a strong link between parental alcohol use disorders (AUDs) and the risk of their children developing an AUD.  In other words, a parent’s alcoholism is associated with a increased risk of alcoholism among their children.

Danish researcher Erik Lykke Mortensen, associate professor in medical psychology at the University of Copenhagen and author of the study, collected data from over 7,000 people regarding alcohol abuse and other psychatric disorders.  They also examined parental alcohol use, gender and social status.

The results showed that parental alcohol abuse corresponds to offspring alcohol disorders, independent of other predictors such as gender, social status and other psychiatric disorders.

Furthermore, Mortensen said, the association appeared to be stronger for female offspring than it was for males.

“The key message for the general public is that there is an increased risk associated with parental alcoholism,” said Mortensen, “but obviously many other factors determine whether an individual develops an AUD.”

The study will be published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Blame it on the alcohol – or the genes? Scientists believe they have identified a gene that plays a role in regulating how much alcohol people drink.

In a study of over 47,000 people, researchers observed a common genetic variation was associated with lower levels of alcohol consumption.

The gene, called autism susceptibility candidate 2, or AUTS2, is most active in the parts of the brain that deal with reward mechanisms, which may indicate that it plays a part in regulating the positive reinforcement people feel when they drink alcohol.

The AUTS2 gene has two variations, with one that expresses itself three times as much as the other. People with the less common version of the gene drink on average five percent less alcohol than people with the more common version.

AUTS2 has previously been linked to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but its exact function is not known.

The study was conducted by an international consortium led by scientists at Imperial College London and King’s College London. The scientists collected DNA samples from all the participants and had them fill out a questionnaire about their alcohol consumption.

They hope their findings will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms behind alcohol consumption and the development of individually targeted prevention and treatments for alcohol abuse and addiction.

Until now, only one other gene had been shown to have an effect on alcohol consumption – the gene encoding alcohol dehydrogenase, an enzyme that breaks down alcohol in the liver.

The study was published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.