The alcoholic brain
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute (San Diego), working under the guidance of Dr. Chitra Mandyam, in experiments on rhesus monkeys found that chronic alcohol consumption reduces the number of neurons formed in the hippocampus and other "dispatcher" and involved in the processes of memorization areas of the brain.
The researchers provided Rhesus males daily for an hour from Monday to Friday (whose age at the beginning of the experiment was 4-5 years old - men in the prime of life) with access to a delicious drink with the addition of 6% ethyl alcohol. The animals of the control group had access to the same drink without alcohol. On average, during one session, the monkeys of the experimental group consumed 1.78 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight (the equivalent for a 70-kilogram person is 0.3 liters of vodka or 2 liters of the same "lemonade").
Five months later, the authors analyzed the level of neurogenesis in the brain of animals, paying special attention to the hippocampus. It turned out that chronic alcohol consumption significantly suppressed the formation of new neurons from specialized nerve stem cells. At the same time, alcohol–consuming animals showed a decrease in stem cell proliferation by 58%, and their differentiation into neurons - by 63%. If we translate these percentages into times, it turns out that the nerve cells of alcoholic monkeys recovered 7 times worse than their non-drinking neighbors. And if you consider that excessive alcohol consumption also causes degeneration of existing neurons...
To console readers a little, we add that in the theses of the report by C. D. Mandyam et al. "Chronic voluntary alcohol consumption produces permanent impairment of hippocampal neurogenesis in adolescent nonhuman primates" at the Neuroscience 2009 conference held in mid-October, the activity of alcohol and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase in primates was not indicated. Perhaps, in alcoholic monkeys, neurons die faster and more intensively than in their fellow Homo sapiens species, and even with Northern European versions of these enzymes.
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29.10.2009