Alcohol Affects The Brain

Our brain consists of millions of nerve cells that communicate through neurotransmitters. Alcohol affects our brain in several ways. It changes the brain’s membranes, ion channels, enzymes, and receptors. Alcohol binds directly to the receptors for acetylcholine, serotonin, GABA, and the NMDA receptors for glutamate. GABA’s effect is to reduce neural activity by allowing chloride ions to enter the post-synaptic neuron. These ions have a negative electrical charge, which helps to make the neuron less excitable. This increases when alcohol binds to the GABA receptor, probably because it enables the ion channel to stay open longer and thus let more Cl- ions into the cell. Futher more, the neuron’s activity diminishes, which explains alcohol’s sedative effect. This effect is accentuated because alcohol also reduces glutamate’s excitatory effect on NMDA receptors. The chronic consumption of alcohol little by little makes the NMDA receptors sensitive to glutamate while desensitizing the GABAergic receptors. This adaptation causes the state of excitation characteristic of alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol also helps to increase the release of dopamine

Alcohol is considered a depressant and it affects the brain by changing the brain’s neurotransmitters. Two papers that discusses the effect of alcohol on humans are “Characteristics of Pregnant Women Who Engage in Binge Alcohol Consumption” by Jonathan Gladstone and colleagues and “Treatment Outcomes for Alcohol Dependence AmongMiddle-Aged and Older Adults” by David W. Oslin and colleagues. Experiment one hypothesized that pregnant woman that are involved in binge drinking are most likely to engage in other behavior not related to drinking and that might have an effect on the pregnancy outcome. ...

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...r control group. They used pregnant woman who attended the clinic and some were pregnant woman counseled on the phone. Nothing tells us that these women were not involved in binge drinking when they were out of the hospital. The counselors will never know unless they actually diagnose them. In experiment two, a prospective naturalistic study was performed in order to examine the differences in the clinical presentation and treatment outcomes of older adults with a diagnosis of alcohol dependence compared to middle aged adults. The authors point out that “most patients completed at least 25 days of patient rehabilitation (81.7%).” this means that not all of the patients were at the rehabilitation center throughout the research. The result can therefore not be accurate because we are not sure if the remaining 18.3% was mostly made up of middle aged or older adults.