Alcoholism Found To Harm Parts Of The Brain Governing Self-Control

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Regularly drinking too much alcohol can cause measurable damage to the brain’s frontal and superior white matter tracts, according to new research appearing in the December 2014 online-only edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
In the study, corresponding author Catherine Brawn Fortier, a neuropsychologist and researcher at the VA Boston Healthcare System and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues used high-resolution structural magnetic resonance (MR) scans to determine the brain’s regional vulnerability to chronic alcohol abuse.
The brain scans revealed that the excessive alcohol consumption caused particular damage to the white matter tracts in the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that helps govern behaviors such as self-control, planning, and judgment, reasoning and learning new behaviors, Madlen Davies of The Daily Mail explained.
“Damaging the white tracts in this area interferes with impulse control, which is needed to achieve and maintain abstinence from an addictive substance like alcohol,” Davies noted. As such, Fortier and her colleagues believe that their research may help explain the reason that it is so difficult for alcoholics to kick the drinking habit.
“The idea that alcohol affects the brain has been established for decades,” Fortier added in a statement. “Before advances in neuroimaging technology, the degree to which alcohol affects the brain across different levels of alcohol use, and how it may interact with other health factors, could only be inferred from behavior and through post-mortem studies. We now can use neuroimaging techniques to see, in vivo, that alcohol has wide ranging effects across the entire brain that contribute to a wide range of changes in psychological abilities and intellectual functions.”
The authors noted that the human brain is usually divided into two broad types of tissues – gray matter and white matter. Gray matter, or the cortex consisting of neurons, contains the critical cells which support brain function, while white matter is the connection among large groups of those cells. Alcohol affects both types of matters, but has the greatest impact on the frontal lobes.
“These brain areas are critical to learning new information and, even more importantly, in self-regulation, impulse control, and the modification of all complicated human behaviors. In other words, the very parts of the brain that may be most important for controlling problem drinking are damaged by alcohol, and the more alcohol consumed, the greater the damage,” Fortier said.
The frontal white matter tracts connect the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain, she added, and the frontal cortex “is the integration center for all other parts of the brain that are important to behavior and cognitive function. These pathways support self-monitoring, planning, judgment, and reasoning. Frontal pathways also allow flexibility in learning and memory, and allow us to change and learn new patterns of behavior. Most importantly, frontal pathways underlie impulse control, which is essential to achieve and maintain abstinence.”
She and her colleagues assessed both global and white matter microstructure in two groups using diffusion MR measures of fractional anisotropy (FA) to create a three-dimensional measurement of white matter tissue. Of the subjects, 31 were abstinent alcoholics (20 men, 11 women) with an average of 25 years of abuse and approximately five years of sobriety, while the other 20 were nonalcoholic control participants (13 men, 7 women).
“There were two key findings to our study,” Fortier explained. “First, recovered alcoholics showed reductions in white matter pathways across the entire brain as compared to healthy light drinkers. This means that the pathways that allow the different parts of their brains to communicate efficiently and effectively are disrupted by alcoholism. Second, the effect of alcohol on the brain appears to be dose specific.”
“Pathology is often thought of as occurring as an all-or-none phenomenon – you either have brain damage or you don’t, similar to a stroke. Alcohol, however, is more like sunburn,” she added. “Our study shows that the damage occurs as a function of quantity and exposure; the more you drink, the greater the damage to key structures of the brain… so tragically, it appears that some of the areas of the brain that are most effected by alcohol are important for self-control and judgment, the very things needed to recover from misuse of alcohol.”
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