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New Preliminary Studies Link Teen Alcohol Abuse to Brain Damage

SAN DIEGO--Most kids know that abusing alcohol is stupid. In addition to being illegal, underage drinking can lead to alcohol addiction, depression, and fatal accidents, studies show. But did you know that drinking might actually make you stupid?

Three recent scientific studies suggest that heavy drinking by teens may cause memory loss and perhaps even permanent brain damage.

Who's at risk? The estimated 3 million U.S. teens who abuse alcohol despite its many risks, said Enoch Gordis, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Gordis said that although more research needs to be done, with larger sample groups and longer periods, the recent research suggest that "teens who drink heavily may not realize their full potential."

Shrinking Heads 

In one of the studies, scientists at the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center used a special brain scan, called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), to compare the sizes of various brain regions in 36 adolescents. Twelve of the teens regularly drank alcohol and 24 did not. The MRIs showed that the teens who drank heavily had smaller hippocampi than did the students without drinking problems. The hippocampus is a region of the brain associated with memory and learning.

"The difference [between the drinkers and nondrinkers] was fairly substantial, about a 10 percent difference, which for this region of the brain is a major difference," said Dr. Duncan B. Clark, coauthor of the study with Michael De Bellis.

De Bellis said that scientists have long known that adults who have been heavy drinkers for years have damaged hippocampi. "But the injury was thought to be inflicted over decades of bathing the brain in alcohol," he explained.

Until recently, scientists thought that humans' brains were fully developed by the teenage years. "Adolescence is a period during which we now know that the brain continues to rapidly develop," said Clark. "The hippocampus is one of the areas that's rapidly changing at this time and may be affected by alcohol."

De Bellis warned that the study does not conclusively prove that alcohol damages the hippocampus, because other factors might have contributed to its smaller size in kids who drank heavily.

Your Brain on Drugs

Recent studies by physicians Sandra A. Brown, Greg Brown, and Susan F. Tapert, all of the Veterans Administration San Diego Healthcare System and University of California at San Diego, show similarly disturbing preliminary findings on the effects of teen drinking.

In one study, the researchers compared test results of thirty-three 15- and 16-year-olds who drank heavily with those of 24 teens of the same age who rarely drank. All had similar IQ scores and had completed about the same amount of schooling.

To compare the two groups, the scientists gave all 57 kids a series of memory and spatial perception tests. The groups scored about the same on the tests, but when the scientists later asked the kids to recall their answers, the alcohol-dependent teens could not remember as much as the kids who did not drink. All of the teens were sober for at least three weeks prior to taking the tests.

In other research, to be published soon, the San Diego team studied ten alcohol-free women who had abused alcohol as teenagers. (The women are now in their late teens or early 20s.) The researchers snapped a series of MRI pictures of the women as they took a test in which they had to remember the location of objects. The scientists also took MRIs of ten women with no history of drinking as they took the test. "The women who had a history of drinking had trouble remembering the locations of objects [that is, spatial memory]," reported Tapert, who explained that damage to spatial memory could affect a person's ability to read a map or do math problems. The MRIs of those women's brains showed less brain activity than the MRIs of the women who did not abuse alcohol.

Tapert said her team's MRI study suggests alcohol abuse might cause long-term brain damage, since some of the women with poor spatial memory had been alcohol-free for several months.

Think Before You Drink

All of the scientists involved in these early studies stress that more research must be done before they can conclude that alcohol abuse causes brain damage in teens. But in the meantime, said Dr. Tapert, "If you want to do well in school and be able to remember all kinds of things that you learn, avoid any kind of heavy drinking."

CONSIDER THIS ... Will the news that alcohol abuse might damage kids' brains have any effect on how much teens drink? Why or why not?