Brain Damage Can Occur While Binge Drinking

April 16 -- A lifetime of heavy drinking can take its toll on the brain and body, but new research confirms what many have suspected — that brain damage can occur after only a few days of heavy drinking.

The animal study, published in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, finds that rats given large "bingeing" doses of alcohol every eight hours for four consecutive days experienced damage to their brains.

The area of the brain responsible for smell was damaged after only two days of heavy drinking and other regions were damaged after four days.

The new study counters a common belief that damage to brain cells occurs when the brain withdraws from long-term alcohol abuse, and not during alcohol consumption.

"We found that in fact the damage appeared to be predominantly occurring in this binge drinking model during the intoxication," says Fulton Crews, director of the center for alcohol studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and co-author of the study.

"This is a four-day model," added Crews. "If you went on a long weekend binge, you could do this."

The amount of alcohol given to the rats was roughly the equivalent of 10 drinks in a single occasion for humans, twice the amount commonly defined as binge drinking for men (it's four or more drinks for women).

Such binge drinking is relatively common — 15 percent of adults reported engaging in the practice at least once within the previous month, according to 1999 data from the National Center of Health Statistics.

The Damage of Drinking

A lot of what is known about human brains and alcohol has come from autopsy studies after someone dies following years of abuse.

"It's under those conditions that most of our knowledge about the damaging effects of alcohol has occurred. But it doesn't mean that it hasn't occurred earlier," says John Crabbe, director of the Portland Alcohol Research Center at Oregon Health Sciences University.

Some time ago, it was thought that brain damage associated with drinking was related to the poor nutritional intake of alcoholics — chronic drinking is related to a vitamin B1 deficiency and dementia.