How does teen dating affect teen drinking? Not in the way you might expect.

A study of nearly 500 students shows it’s not necessarily a significant other’s drinking habits that influence a teenager, but rather the drinking habits of the significant other’s friends that do.

The drinking habits of a romantic partner’s friends are even more likely to affect a teenager’s drinking patterns than the teenager’s own friends do.

“Dating someone whose friends are big drinkers is more likely to cause an adolescent to engage in dangerous drinking behaviors than are the drinking habits of the adolescent’s own friends or romantic partner,” said Derek Kreager, study author. “This applies to both binge drinking and drinking frequency.”

However, the researchers added, the effect doesn’t always skew towards heavier drinking. It can actually go either way.

“If an adolescent is a drinker and he or she starts going out with someone whose friends predominately don’t drink, you would find the same effect but in the opposite direction,” Kreager said.

The researchers speculate that teenagers adopt habits of their partner’s friends in order to strengthen their relationship with their partner.

There was a slight gender difference apparent in the study. Girls were significantly less likely than their male partners to binge drink.

“Our research suggests that, if anything, males are more susceptible to a significant other’s influence than are girls,” Kreager said.

The study was published in the journal American Sociological Review.

What’s the secret behind living to be 100 years old? Not a healthier lifestyle, apparently.

People who live to be 95 or older are no more virtuous than anyone else in terms of diet, exercise or smoking and drinking, according to researchers at Yeshiva University.

The researchers said results from a new study indicate that “nature,” or genes, may be more influential than “nurture,” or lifestyle, in terms of longevity.

After comparing centenarians, or people who live to be 100 years old, to the general elderly population, the researchers found no significant differences in BMI, smoking habits, physical activity or diet.
And for the most part, the lifestyles in both groups were not particularly healthy. For example, neither group was very likely to attempt a low calorie-diet, while a significant portion of both groups drank alcohol every day. About half of each group engaged in some kind of regular exercise.

One difference, the researchers found, was that centenarians had lower rates of obesity than the general elderly population, though they were equally as likely to be overweight.

Previous research has identified that centenarians may have certain gene variants that exert positive physiological effects such as causing significantly elevated levels of HDL or ‘good’ cholesterol, and the researchers said this new study indicates there may be more, unidentified longevity-related genes that buffer against the harmful effects of an unhealthy lifestyle.

However, the researchers stressed that while these genes may protect centenarians from bad habits, healthy lifestyle choices remain critical for the majority of the population in terms of health benefits and lifespan.

As a final question, the researchers asked why the centenarians themselves believed they had lived so long. The majority cited family longevity (33 percent) while 20 percent believed physical activity played a role. Other answers included positive attitude, busy or active life, less smoking and drinking, good luck and religion.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

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.

Stress is our body’s ability to respond to our surroundings–how we react to our family, our work, and various events in our lives.

Stress is normal. Everyone is under some kind of stress—every day. But there are two kinds of stress: the good and the bad. Good stress can be something like getting a new job or buying a first home. Bad stress can range from experiencing a difficult financial situation to having a sick family member, to missing a flight to getting a flat tire in the pouring rain.

Short-lived stress rarely affects long-term health. But stress becomes a problem when it’s chronic and difficult to identify. Stress manifests itself through feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, frustration, guilt, or excitement. Our mood starts to fluctuate. Some people drink or smoke; others opt for healthier outlets such as jogging. Some just go shopping.

Eventually, our body starts to ache here and there, first a little bit, then more and more. Those may seem like “phantom aches” at first, but as time goes by, they can become legitimate physical health threats. If left unchecked, stress can ultimately cause blood pressure oscillations and weaken the immune system, which makes us much more susceptible to illnesses that our body, under normal circumstances, would be able to fight.

People can eventually die from the effects of stress because, at the end of the day, those under stress are going to have more heart disease, more diabetes, more obesity, and more gastric problems like ulcers than people who are relatively stress-free.

One of the most severe types of stress is called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that occurs after experiencing an extremely stressful situation or witnessing a life-threatening event, like a terrorist attack, a violent personal assault, or a natural disaster.

People suffering from PTSD have symptoms that include flashbacks, difficulty sleeping, mood changes, depression, and the inability to deal with everyday life. These are not those nutty people walking around in ripped and filthy clothes, talking to themselves and their imaginary friends. They are fully functional people, people like you and me, who may be stressed out by the daily media reminders of kidnapped children, serial killers, and sexual abuse. And oftentimes, these people don’t even know they have PTSD.

Signs of Stress

–Do you tend to race through the day, do everything yourself, and set unrealistic goals?

–Do you make a big deal of everything, blow up easily, and get angry when kept waiting?

–Do you frequently neglect your diet, exercise, and your sleep?

–Do you lack close, supportive relationships outside your family?

–Do you often fail to see the humor in situations that others find amusing?

–Do you ignore symptoms of stress and have no time for questions like this?
If you answered yes to most of these questions, chance are you are STRESSED OUT. Do something about it.

It’s important that you take stress seriously and learn how to handle it.

First, recognize the signs and acknowledge them.

Second, ask yourself: Am I leading a healthy life, exercising, not abusing drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol? If not, you have to make some lifestyle changes. The solution, many times, is right in front of you. But for the most part, if you recognize stress as something that is out there, and if you’re able to manage it adequately, it will have no dire effects on your health. It is only when you ignore it and it becomes chronic and unstoppable that you need to seek professional help.

According to results from a new study, drinking alcohol can prime certain areas of the brain to learn and remember better.

The idea sounds counter intuitive, considering that we’ve long associated alcohol with decreased memory capacity – and in fact, that common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, said lead author and neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa.

However, he said, that’s only half the story of what ethanol consumption does to the brain.

“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” said Morikawa in a press release.  “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”

Morikawa’s study falls in line with a growing consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.

When people drink alcohol – or engage in any other illegal drug use – their subconscious is learning to consume more.

People under the influence also become more receptive to forming subconscious memories and habits with respect to their current environment, which includes the food, music, people and social situations that are present.

According to Morikawa, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol so much as they are addicted to the environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced with alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

“People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter,” said Morikawa. “It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”

Essentially, this means alcohol is an enabler.  It assumes control over the system that regulates dopamine and tells the brain that what we’re doing at the moment is rewarding and ought to be repeated.

Thus, we get addicted to the situation: drinking, being at the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain kinds of music.  The more often we do these things while drinking, the more dopamine that gets released and the more we crave these situations and experiences that center around the alcohol use.

Morikawa hopes that his study will help to further pin down the neurological mechanisms behind addiction and assist in the development of anti-addiction drugs that would weaken, rather than strengthen, the subconscious learning that alcohol is a rewarding experience.

“We’re talking about de-wiring things,” said Morikawa. “It’s kind of scary because it has the potential to be a mind controlling substance. Our goal, though, is to reverse the mind controlling aspects of addictive drugs.”

The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

It’s that time of the year again – St. Patrick’s Day.  For some, it’s a religious day that involves attending church services, wearing green, and celebrating Irish culture.  For others, it’s a day of general revelry, comprised of drinking, attending parades, and staying out late.

Unfortunately, St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Thursday this year.  That means, for most of us, after all the partying on the holiday, there’s still one more day of work to suffer through until the weekend.

It also means that it may be difficult to follow through with typical “go-to” hangover cures.  There’s no sleeping in on work days, and there may not even be time to cook up a big greasy breakfast.  Forget about the hair-of-the-dog cure, i.e. drinking more alcohol.  No boss is going to appreciate an employee coming in slurring their words and smelling like gin.

Here’s the truth: The best cure for a hangover on a work day is not getting one at all.  It doesn’t mean you can’t join in on any of the festivities – or the drinking because, let’s face it, who can resist green beer?  It just means you have to be smart while you enjoy yourself.  While not drinking is the only fool-proof way to avoid a hangover, here are a few other tips to lessen the pain of waking up bright and early tomorrow morning:

Before drinking:

1. Eat.  Not greasy pizza or bar food, but a solid, starchy meal with a lot of vitamins and minerals.  The food will help absorb the alcohol and lessen it’s effects on you.  Get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit with hearty meals like vegetable shepard’s pie or corned beef with cabbage and potatoes.

2. Drink.  Not so fast!  Put down the green beer, and pick up a glass of water.  And then another.  A glass of fruit juice is also a good idea.  Hydrating your body now will be much more effective against pain than waiting until tomorrow morning.

3. Prepare your given hangover-cure now.  Tomorrow, you’re going to want as much sleep as possible.  Save time – and let yourself punch the snooze button a couple of times in the morning – by taking care of your hangover needs now.  If it’s food or a drink, it’ll keep for a night in the fridge.  If it’s a pill, rather than having to waste time rifling through your drawers, put it on your bedside table next to a tall glass of water.

4. Get out early.  Try to take advantage of happy hours and call it an early night.  That way, you can have your fun but still get as much sleep as you need.  Sleep is one of the best defenses against a vicious hangover.

While drinking:

1. Eat.  Because you took care of your vitamin and starch needs earlier, now’s the time when you can munch on less-than-healthy bar food.  The point here is to keep your stomach full enough to keep absorbing alcohol.

2. Stick with light beers on a work day.  If you do need a Guinness to get into the spirit, drink one and drink it early.  Darker beers contain more congeners, which equals more pain in the morning.  Light beers are much easier on your body – and your stomach.  Also, while we’re on the topic of alcohol, try to stay away from liquor, which is going to hit you hard and fast and isn’t going to mix well at all with the green beer you’ve already consumed.  Save it for tomorrow night instead.

3. Alternate between alcoholic and non-alcholic drinks.  This will slow down your alcohol intake with the added bonus of still giving you something to hold in your hands.  If you’re worried about you’re friends giving you a hard time, keep in mind that they can’t tell what’s actually in your hand.  It’s easy to pass off orange juice as a screwdriver or mineral water as a vodka tonic.  Remember: Your liver can only break down an average of one beer an hour.

4. Drink a glass of water and take some vitamin B before crashing for the night.  The goal here is to replace what the alcohol has drained out of your body.  It’s also much better for you than any pain relievers like Tylenol, Ibuprofen or Aspirin, which can cause serious damage to your liver.

Like I mentioned earlier, these tips do not guarantee a hangover-free morning (only not drinking does), but they will give you a fighting chance.  And remember, everything in moderation – even on holidays.  Have a safe and happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone.