Alcohol

Drinking alcohol to stay healthy? That might not work, says new study

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According to a new study published November 2nd in PLOS Medicine by Ulrich John of University Medicine Greifswald, Germany, and colleagues, increased mortality risk among current alcohol abstainers may be largely explained by other factors such as previous alcohol or drug problems, daily smoking, and overall poor health.

According to previous research, persons who don’t drink have a greater mortality risk than those who drink low to moderate amounts of alcohol. Researchers examined data from a random sample of 4,028 German adults who took part in a standardized interview during 1996 and 1997, while they were between the ages of 18 and 64. Baseline data on alcohol consumption in the 12 months preceding to the interview, as well as other health, alcohol, and drug-related information, was available. Follow-up data on mortality was available 20 years later.

447 (11.10 percent) of the study participants had not consumed any alcohol in the 12 months prior to the baseline interview. 405 (90.60 percent) of the abstainers had previously consumed alcohol, and 322 (72.04 percent) had one or more risk factors for higher mortality rates, such as a previous alcohol-use disorder or risky alcohol consumption (35.40 percent), daily smoking (50.00 percent), or fair to poor self-rated health (10.51 percent ). After adjusting for age, sex, and tobacco smoking, the 125 alcohol abstinent people without these risk factors showed no statistically significant difference in total, cardiovascular, or cancer mortality when compared to low to moderate alcohol consumers, and those who had stayed alcohol abstinent throughout their lives had a hazard ratio of 1.64 (95 percent CI 0.72-3.77) when compared to low to moderate alcohol consumers.

“The findings support the concept that people who are now abstinent from alcohol do not necessarily have a lower survival time than people who consume low to moderate amounts of alcohol,” the authors write. “The findings contradict health-related recommendations to drink alcohol.”

John goes on to say, “Based on the discovery that alcohol abstainers died earlier than low to moderate drinkers, it has long been considered that low to moderate alcohol use provides health benefits. We discovered that the majority of abstainers had a history of alcohol or drug issues, high-risk alcohol intake, daily tobacco smoking, or fair to poor health, all of which are risk factors for early death.”

Alcohol-Related Deaths in US Doubled in Past Two Decades: Study

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Between 1999 and 2017, the fatality rate in the United States was increased by 50.9 percent due to alcohol-related disorders, according to a report published yesterday (January 7) in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

There were 35,914 alcohol-related deaths in the United States in 1999, but this number climbed to 72,558 in 2017. According to the report, approximately 1 million Americans died from alcohol-related causes over the last two decades. Around half of these deaths were caused by liver illness or alcohol overdoses.

Alcohol-related deaths in 2017 were comparable to the public health issue of drug overdose deaths—a little more than 70,000 Americans died in 2017 from drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, according to Gizmodo. And the total number of alcohol-related deaths may be an underestimate, as CNN reports that only around one in every six drunk driving deaths is attributed to alcohol.

Men aged 45 to 74 had the highest prevalence of alcohol-related deaths, whereas white women saw the greatest increase in alcohol-related deaths over this time period. “At equivalent levels of alcohol exposure, women are at a larger risk than men of developing alcohol-related cardiovascular diseases, some malignancies, alcohol-related liver disease, and acute liver failure as a result of excessive drinking,” the study’s authors wrote. Native Americans also suffered disproportionately.

According to CNN, binge drinking has climbed by approximately 7.7 percent since the turn of the twenty-first century, while alcohol consumption per capita has increased by approximately 8%. According to NBC News, government guidelines prescribe no more than one alcoholic drink per day for women and two for males.

Scientists uncover previously unknown brain mechanism behind compulsive alcohol use

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A small collection of nerve cells in the brain is responsible for determining whether an individual continues to consume alcohol despite adverse consequences. This is the conclusion of a study conducted on rats by Linköping University researchers.

The researchers discovered a previously undiscovered process that may be a good target for pharmaceutical treatment. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

“We discovered that a small group of nerve cells in a small region of the brain is the difference between being able to apply the brakes normally, as the majority of our rats did, and being unable to do so,” says Markus Heilig, professor of psychiatry and director of Linköping University’s Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience (CSAN). He oversaw the rat study.

A critical component of addiction is that only a small percentage of persons who consume alcohol become dependent. In other words, some individuals are more susceptible to harm than others. The researchers examined the process underlying one of the behaviors associated with addiction, namely the desire to continue drinking alcohol despite the negative consequences; this behavior is commonly referred to as “compulsive use.”

Making complex choices, such as whether to consume another drink or abstain, is difficult. The brain contains a critical system for directing and motivating action. This system places a premium on what we perceive to be pleasurable, such as excellent food, sex, and also drugs, and drives us to seek more.

However, a brake is required to keep us from doing actions that have unintended consequences. The brake weighs prospective undesirable outcomes against the anticipated reward.

The initial step in identifying the biological mechanisms underlying compulsive alcohol use was to determine the vulnerable subset of persons who may be affected by these mechanisms. The rats in the study discovered that by pressing a lever, they could acquire a trace amount of alcohol.

After a time, the conditions evolved to the point where they felt an electric shock in addition to the alcohol when they pressed the lever. In this situation, the majority of rats ceased pressing the lever for further alcohol. However, around a third of the rats’ brakes failed to function, and they continued to press the lever for self-administered alcohol despite the fact that it was now associated with discomfort.

The researchers employed a marker that is generated in nerves shortly after they have been active to identify the group of nerve cells involved in compulsive alcohol usage. They discovered a network of nerve cells spanning many regions of the brain, with the central amygdala serving as the network’s core.

The amygdala is a brain region that regulates fear reactions and is involved in fear-related learning mechanisms. Three years ago, the research group published the findings of an investigation into another behavior associated with alcoholism: the preference for alcohol over another reward. They demonstrated that the central amygdala is also involved in this behavior. By manipulating chemical pathways in this region of the brain, scientists could turn the behavior on and off.

The researchers found a tiny population of nerve cells in the central amygdala, PKCd-positive nerve cells, that supported alcohol consumption in a vulnerable minority of rats despite unfavorable repercussions in their newly published study. Around 4% of these cells formed the network of cells responsible for the brake’s failure to respond to this specific activity. When the researchers turned off these cells using modern molecular techniques, the rats’ ability to abstain from self-administered alcohol was restored. PKCd, an enzyme, was discovered to be critical. The discovery raises the possibility that this enzyme could be a target for future pharmacological treatments.

According to new research, humans and other animal species can also be classified into two groups based on their capacity to break reward-seeking behavior when it has negative repercussions. Markus Heilig believes that additional research is necessary to identify clinical markers that can indicate whether an individual is predisposed to develop an addiction. Early detection may enable the use of preventive measures.

“We must recognize that the inability to interrupt harmful behavior is a significant risk factor for addiction, since it also serves to maintain addiction once it has occurred. We must strengthen people’s ability to resist alcohol-seeking behavior, not just by intervening with their conduct, but also by developing drugs that target the biochemical mechanisms underlying the behavior “, according to Markus Heilig.

Ketamine Could Help Cut Alcohol Consumption by Rewiring Memory

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According to a study published yesterday (November 26) in Nature Communications, the anesthetic medication ketamine may be used to rewire the memory of heavy drinkers and assist them in reducing their alcohol use. In a clinical experiment of adults who reported consuming approximately 590 grams of alcohol per week on average—equivalent to nearly two cases of beer—researchers discovered that delivering the drug when people were contemplating drinking significantly reduced consumption.

While it is unclear how the strategy works on a neurological level, Amy Milton, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge who was not part in the study, tells STAT that the study offers “a really intriguing breakthrough.” She adds that the findings demonstrate for the first time “that this can be successful in a clinical population.”

The study’s objective was to modify the brain’s retrieval and stabilization of memories—in this case, those connecting the sight and thoughts of alcohol to the reward associated with drinking it, according to study coauthor Ravi Das, a psychopharmacologist at University College London. “We’re attempting to destroy those memories in order to halt that process.”

To do this, the researchers invited 30 volunteers to examine a glass of beer followed by a sequence of photographs of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. On the first day of testing, participants were invited to drink beer at the conclusion of the session. On the second day, after watching the beer and photos, the screen was turned off and subjects were given a dose of ketamine instead of beer.

Because ketamine inhibits NMDA receptors—critical proteins in the brain’s reward pathways—the researchers hypothesized that administering the drug during memory retrieval would help participants’ associations between the sight or contemplation of alcohol and the reward associated with drinking it would be weakened. Their findings lend some support to that idea. Nine months after the several-day study, the volunteers reported halving their alcohol consumption.

“To actually observe changes in [participants’] behavior when they leave the lab is a significant finding,” Mary Torregrossa, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, tells Science. However, she emphasizes that it is unclear if the impact was caused by the ketamine or another component of the treatment.

Another 60 subjects, divided into two control groups, got slightly modified procedures involving beer or ketamine and nevertheless demonstrated an average 35% reduction in alcohol intake after nine months. Participants were recruited for the study via internet advertisements, which means that the researchers may have chosen participants who were already interested in reducing their consumption.

Whatever the mechanism underlying the effect, David Epstein, an addiction researcher at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, tells Science News that the strategy is worth examining. “If a seemingly insignificant one-time event in a laboratory yields observable impacts later in life, the results are almost certainly pointing toward something significant.”