Heavy drinking at earlier ages, especially among school-going children, can cause permanent brain damage through neural dysregulation that can have a wide range of implications, both for health as well as social ramifications, researchers of a new study said.

Neural dysregulation, an imbalance between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, can cause mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia, poor attention, and poor memory, but it can also lead to behavioural issues that are counterproductive to living a healthy, balanced life, including difficult personal relationships with colleagues, partners, friends, or family.

The findings of the study currently available in the online version of the journal Neuropharmacology, performed in mouse models, suggest that if adolescents, particularly school-going children, indulge in binge drinking at a time when their brains are still developing, can lead to long-term changes that can interfere the ability of the brain to signal and communicate, potentially setting the stage for long-term behavioural changes and hinting at the mechanisms of alcohol-induced cognitive changes in humans.

Commenting on the findings, Nikki Crowley, assistant professor in biology and biomedical engineering and Huck Early Chair in Neurobiology and Neural Engineering, said, “What we are seeing here is that if adolescent binge drinking knocks neurons off this trajectory, they might not be able to get back, even if the alcohol consumption stops.”

According to Crowley, the prefrontal cortex is a key brain region for executive functioning, risk assessment and decision-making is not fully formed in adolescents and is still maturing in humans till 25 years of age.

“Disruptions to its development in young people may have serious and long-lasting consequences,” she added.

Pointing out that heavy binge drinking is problematic for everyone, Crowley says, “(It) should be avoided, but adolescent brains appear to be particularly vulnerable to the consequences, which in humans, will follow them for decades.”

The study, led by Avery Sicher, a doctoral student in the neuroscience programme at Penn State University, used a model of teenage alcohol exposure in mice to explore how intentional binge alcohol drinking affects neurons in the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. This model's mice have been shown to consume alcohol in patterns similar to human binge drinking, resulting in blood alcohol concentrations of 0.08% or higher.

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According to the researchers, binge drinking is regarded as one of the most harmful patterns of alcohol abuse, and understanding its effects on the developing brain might assist to guide treatment.

During their study, the researchers gave alcohol for 30 days to the mice who corresponded to roughly ages 11-18 in human years owing to their faster lifespans and examined the electrical properties of several neurons in the prefrontal cortex to determine how adolescent binge drinking affected the wiring and firing of these brain circuits.

The researchers found that mice, exposed to binge drinking appeared to have permanently dysregulated neurons compared to mice that were only given water throughout development.

They further found that Somatostatin neurons produce both inhibitory neurotransmitters, such as GABA, and inhibitory peptides, such as somatostatin, and their optimal activity is required for a healthy brain. The neurons were more excitable, thereby signalling too much and reducing the activity of other critical neurons, even 30 days after the mice stopped drinking alcohol when the animals had reached adulthood.

“Neurons have a relatively fixed developmental trajectory, they need to get where they are going and sync up with the right partners during specific periods of development to function properly,” explained Crowley.