Booze and the Brain

I found these two articles quite interesting. They're from the Discover Magazine's "80beats" blog. Click on the article titles to see the entire post.


Rx for the Brain-Injured Patient: A Shot of Tequila?
People with alcohol in their system appear more likely to survive head injuries, according to a new study that has led to speculation that emergency rooms might someday keep a flask on hand to treat brain-injured patients.

Researchers analyzed a national trauma database containing 38,019 cases of moderate to severe head injuries where hospitals also tested the patients for alcohol. For every 100 patients with severe brain injuries who tested negative for alcohol and died, only 88 patients with alcohol in their bloodstream died, a statistically significant 12 percent difference, according to the study, which appears in the Sept. 21 issue of Archives of Surgery [The New York Times]. The boozing patients were also younger and suffered less severe injuries than their sober counterparts. The study is the largest to date examining alcohol’s effect on brain injury survival.



Jell-O Shots in Adolescence Lead to Gambling Later in Life
Following up on today’s earlier post about alcohol and brain injuries, we bring you a study on alcohol and risk taking behavior. It seems obvious that drinking alcohol would lead to immediate risk taking, but does drinking as a teenager lead to risk taking behavior as an adult? Some researchers have suspected as much, but they haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that risk-prone people simply start drinking at an earlier age. So a research group chose an obvious course of action to test the idea—they got a bunch of rats drunk and let them gamble.

The researchers tested two groups of genetically identical rats, one group that was fed a normal diet and another that boozed it up. To get the rats drunk, the researchers borrowed the tried-and-true approach of frat boys everywhere—they fed them Jell-O shots. The rats went on a 20 day bender and were tested for risky behavior 3 weeks later, when they were adults, using a gambling task. The animals learned that pressing one lever produced small but certain rewards in the form of small sugar pellets and an adjacent lever yielded bigger rewards—more pellets—but paid off less frequently. The researchers rigged the game so that in some testing sessions choosing the certain reward was the best overall strategy, while in other sessions the “risky” lever yielded the greatest overall payoff [ScienceNOW Daily News].