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| If He can DO - IT so can you ! |
However, as we have already
seen, alcohol can be very deadly and is both a poison and a drug. In this area
we will learn how it affects you socially and emotionally, causing you to
become in need of a drink and reliant on the effects that just one drink can
bring.
You may also be dealing with
underlying causes of your emotional and social impairment e.g. a stressful job,
the feeling of social awkwardness, low self-esteem which can cause more anxiety
in social situations, there are additional problem to deal with, i.e. the
serious effects of alcohol like blacking out and becoming rather antisocial
rather than the happy go lucky you may think you are becoming or just the issue
at hand. And it can also exacerbate these destructive emotional feelings and amplify
them.
So, if you are in a good
emotional state and then drink you are more likely to be able to moderate your
drinking. If you are using alcohol to change your emotional state then excess
is a likely possibility as well as frequently drinking in order to get back to
the change in emotional state.
The most common form of emotional effect of drinking alcohol is the lessening of inhibitions you feel after a couple of drinks. This is because alcohol is a depressant. This means that alcohol starts to switch how you act and speak, and it is these behaviors that will cause a problem for you psychologically and on a social basis.
Alcohol is like a magnifier. If you are depressed, it will make you more depressed. The same goes for angry people who can become angrier and more violent
Difficulty walking blurred vision, slurred speech, slowed reaction times, impaired memory: Clearly, alcohol affects the brain. Some of these impairments are detectable after only one or two drinks and quickly resolve when drinking stops. On the other hand, a person who drinks heavily over a long period of time may have brain deficits that persist well after he or she achieves sobriety. Exactly how alcohol affects the brain and the likelihood of reversing the impact of heavy drinking on the brain remain hot topics in alcohol research today.
- how much and how often a person drinks;
- the age at which he or she first began drinking, and how long he or she has been drinking;
- the person’s age, level of education, gender, genetic background, and family history of alcoholism;
- whether he or she is at risk as a result of prenatal alcohol exposure; and
- his or her general health status.
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Drunken people do put both
themselves and others in danger through many of their behaviors and becoming aggressive
or act very inappropriate. The loss of awareness (blackout) can put drunken
people in danger of being injured physical and sexual. In the US, UK and
Canada, researchers found that most domestic violence incidents (spouse and
child abuse) occur when the perpetrator has been drinking excessively.
Excessive drinking also
affects chemical balances within the brain. Such as the production of
serotonin, which regulates moods? Some depressive feelings, insomnia, and a
loss of concentration can be the results.
Heavy drinking interferes
with the balance of chemicals in the brain. It lowers the production of
serotonin, which regulates to mood - this leads to mild symptoms of depression,
including insomnia, sluggishness, anxiety and loss of concentration.
MAGNIFYING YOUR EXISTING EMOTIONS
ALCOHOL’S DAMAGINGEFFECTS ON THE BRAIN
We do know that heavy
drinking may have extensive and far–reaching effects on the brain, ranging from
simple “slips” in memory to permanent and debilitating conditions that require
lifetime custodial care. And even moderate drinking leads to short–term
impairment, as shown by extensive research on the impact of drinking on
driving.
A number of factors
influence how and to what extent alcohol affects the brain (1), including
This Alcohol
Alert reviews some common disorders associated with alcohol–related
brain damage and the people at greatest risk for impairment. It looks at
traditional as well as emerging therapies for the treatment and prevention of
alcohol–related disorders and includes a brief look at the high–tech tools that
are helping scientists to better understand the effects of alcohol on the
brain.
BLACKOUTS AND MEMORY LAPSES
Alcohol can produce
detectable impairments in memory after only a few drinks and, as the amount of alcohol
increases, so does the degree of impairment. Large quantities of alcohol,
especially when consumed quickly and on an empty stomach, can produce a
blackout, or an interval of time for which the intoxicated person cannot recall
key details of events, or even entire events.
Blackouts are much more
common among social drinkers than previously assumed and should be viewed as a
potential consequence of acute intoxication regardless of age or whether the
drinker is clinically dependent on alcohol (2). White and colleagues (3)
surveyed 772 college undergraduates about their experiences with blackouts and
asked, “Have you ever awoken after a night of drinking not able to remember
things that you did or places that you went?” Of the students who had ever consumed
alcohol, 51 percent reported blacking out at some point in their lives, and 40
percent reported experiencing a blackout in the year before the survey. Of
those who reported drinking in the 2 weeks before the survey, 9.4 percent said
they blacked out during that time. The students reported learning later that
they had participated in a wide range of potentially dangerous events they
could not remember, including vandalism, unprotected sex, and driving.
ARE WOMEN MORE VULNERABLE TO ALCOHOL’S EFFECTS
ON THE BRAIN?
Women are more
vulnerable than men to many of the medical consequences of alcohol use. For
example, alcoholic women develop cirrhosis (5), alcohol–induced damage of the
heart muscle (i.e., cardiomyopathy) (6), and nerve damage (i.e., peripheral
neuropathy) (7) after fewer years of heavy drinking than do alcoholic men.
Studies comparing men and women’s sensitivity to alcohol–induced brain damage,
however, have not been as conclusive.
Using imaging with
computerized tomography, two studies (8, 9) compared brain shrinkage, a common
indicator f brain damage, in alcoholic men and women and reported that male and
female alcoholics both showed significantly greater brain shrinkage than
control subjects. Studies also showed that both men and women have similar
learning and memory problems as a result of heavy drinking (10). The difference
is that alcoholic women reported that they had been drinking excessively for
only about half as long as the alcoholic men in these studies. This indicates
that women’s brains, like their other organs, are more vulnerable to
alcohol–induced damage than men’s (11).
Yet other studies have
not shown such definitive findings. In fact, two reports appearing side by side
in the American Journal of Psychiatry contradicted each other on
the question of gender–related vulnerability to brain shrinkage in alcoholism
(12, 13). Clearly, more research is needed on this topic, especially because
alcoholic women have received less research attention than alcoholic men
despite good evidence that women may be particularly vulnerable to alcohol’s
effects on many key organ systems.
BRAIN DAMAGE FROM OTHER CAUSES
People who have been
drinking large amounts of alcohol for long periods of time run the risk of
developing serious and persistent changes in the brain. Damage may be a result
of the direct effects of alcohol on the brain or may result indirectly, from a
poor general health status or from severe liver disease.
For example, thiamine
deficiency is a common occurrence in people with alcoholism and results from
poor overall nutrition. Thiamine, also known as vitamin B1, is an essential
nutrient required by all tissues, including the brain. Thiamine is found in
foods such as meat and poultry; whole grain cereals; nuts; and dried beans,
peas, and soybeans. Many foods in the United States commonly are fortified with
thiamine, including breads and cereals. As a result, most people consume
sufficient amounts of thiamine in their diets. The typical intake for most
Americans is 2 mg/day; the Recommended Daily Allowance is 1.2 mg/day for men
and 1.1 mg/day for women (14).
LIVER DISEASE
Most people realize that heavy, long–term drinking can damage the
liver, the organ chiefly responsible for breaking down alcohol into harmless
byproducts and clearing it from the body. But people may not be aware that
prolonged liver dysfunction, such as liver cirrhosis resulting from excessive
alcohol consumption, can harm the brain, leading to a serious and potentially
fatal brain disorder known as hepatic encephalopathy (20).
Hepatic encephalopathy can cause changes in sleep patterns, mood,
and personality; psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression; severe
cognitive effects such as shortened attention span; and problems with
coordination such as a flapping or shaking of the hands (called asterixis). In
the most serious cases, patients may slip into a coma (i.e., hepatic coma),
which can be fatal.
New imaging techniques have enabled researchers to study specific
brain regions in patients with alcoholic liver disease, giving them a better
understanding of how hepatic encephalopathy develops. These studies have
confirmed that at least two toxic substances, ammonia and manganese, have a role
in the development of hepatic encephalopathy. Alcohol–damaged liver cells allow
excess amounts of these harmful byproducts to enter the brain, thus harming
brain cells.
ALCOHOL AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
Drinking during pregnancy can lead to a range of physical,
learning, and behavioral effects in the developing brain, the most serious of
which is a collection of symptoms known as fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).
Children with FAS may have distinct facial features (see illustration). FAS
infants also are markedly smaller than average. Their brains may have less
volume (i.e., microencephaly). And they may have fewer numbers of brain cells
(i.e., neurons) or fewer neurons that are able to function correctly, leading
to long–term problems in learning and behavior.
GROWING NEW BRAIN CELLS
For decades scientists believed that the number of nerve cells in
the adult brain was fixed early in life. If brain damage occurred, then, the
best way to treat it was by strengthening the existing neurons, as new ones
could not be added. In the 1960s, however, researchers found that new neurons
are indeed generated in adulthood—a process called neurogenesis (29). These new
cells originate from stem cells, which are cells that can divide indefinitely,
renew themselves, and give rise to a variety of cell types. The discovery of
brain stem cells and adult neurogenesis provides a new way of approaching the
problem of alcohol–related changes in the brain and may lead to a clearer
understanding of how best to treat and cure alcoholism (30).
For example, studies with animals show that high doses of alcohol
lead to a disruption in the growth of new brain cells; scientists believe it
may be this lack of new growth that results in the long–term deficits found in
key areas of the brain (such as hippocampal structure and function) (31,32).
Understanding how alcohol interacts with brain stem cells and what happens to
these cells in alcoholics is the first step in establishing whether the use of
stem cell therapies is an option for treatment (33).
SUMMARY
Alcoholics are not all alike. They experience different degrees of
impairment, and the disease has different origins for different people.
Consequently, researchers have not found conclusive evidence that any one
variable is solely responsible for the brain deficits found in alcoholics.
Characterizing what makes some alcoholics vulnerable to brain damage whereas
others are not remains the subject of active research (34).
The good news is that most alcoholics with cognitive impairment
show at least some improvement in brain structure and functioning within a year
of abstinence, though some people take much longer (35–37). Clinicians must
consider a variety of treatment methods to help people stop drinking and to
recover from alcohol–related brain impairments, and tailor these treatments to
the individual patient.
Advanced technology will have an important role in developing
these therapies. Clinicians can use brain–imaging techniques to monitor the
course and success of treatment, because imaging can reveal structural, functional,
and biochemical changes in living patients over time. Promising new medications
also are in the early stages of development, as researchers strive to design
therapies that can help prevent alcohol’s harmful effects and promote the
growth of new brain cells to take the place of those that have been damaged by
alcohol.