A drink against stress is an effective remedy for many people. But recent research has shown that those who start such self-medication at a young age already suffer from cognitive problems in middle age, even after long periods of complete abstinence.
There is a reduced ability to deal with changing situations, a greater tendency to drink when stressed and a cognitive decline linked to dementia.
Researchers have long known that stress and alcohol have a mutually reinforcing relationship: alcohol can help take the edge off stressful situations, but at the expense of the brain’s ability to self-regulate stress. As a result, a person must continue to drink to relieve the stress of a bad day.
At the same time, drinking more leads to more stress because drinkers are less able to make decisions. It can become a vicious cycle that becomes more difficult to break as brain structures change.
Bad decisions due to alcohol
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“My lab investigates the neural networks that underlie how we make decisions,” said lead researcher Elena Vazey, associate professor of biology at UMass Amherst. “We all know that drinking often leads to poor decisions, but we wondered how alcohol use in early adulthood, combined with stress, affects these networks, especially as we get older.”
Vazey and her colleagues worked with mice, whose brain networks are similar to those of humans, and found that the combination of alcohol and stress is particularly damaging to the brain. Neither alcohol alone nor stress alone causes the same damage as the combination of the two.
Long-term changes in the brain
Moreover, people who drink heavily as young adults to cope with stress appear to be more likely to turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism in middle age, even after long periods of abstinence. This suggests that alcohol and stress can cause long-lasting changes in the brain.
As middle age arrives, a history of stress and alcohol consumption appears to have less impact on learning compared to light drinkers. Instead, flexibility — the ability to switch quickly and adapt to new and challenging situations — is significantly reduced.
Problems in middle age
“Middle age is the time when problems start to pile up,” says Vazey. “We know that alcohol is a risk factor for early cognitive decline and we saw that this combination of alcohol and stress leads to problems adapting to changing situations, as also occurs in the early stages of dementia.”
But why does this happen? In search of an answer, the team focused on a part of the brainstem, the locus coeruleus (LC), which is responsible for adaptive decision-making in both mice and humans.
The first thing they discovered was how in a fasted brain the LC is activated by stress and can switch itself off again as soon as the stress subsides. But in a brain exposed to a history of stress and alcohol, the LC loses the molecular mechanisms needed to turn itself off, hindering its ability to guide good decisions.
Oxidative stress
The team also found that the LC showed clear signs of oxidative stress, a characteristic normally seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Oxidative stress is harmful to cells and the body in general. Even after prolonged abstinence, the brains of middle-aged, previously heavy-drinking mice were unable to fully repair themselves.
“The brain can have great difficulty recovering from a history of chronic stress and alcohol use in early adulthood,” says Vazey. “We think that this oxidative damage may be one of the factors that perpetuates heavy drinking, causing a person to return to alcohol use even after long periods of abstinence. It is these lasting changes in the brain that also impair decision-making and lead to early cognitive decline such as in dementia and Alzheimer’s.”
“The brain’s ‘wiring’ is damaged, meaning that quitting drinking or making better choices is not simply a matter of willpower. After a history of stress and alcohol use, the brain functions differently and our treatment strategies must take these long-lasting changes into account,” the lead researcher concluded.
We have written about this subject before, for example also read: There appears to be a surprising link between ADHD and alcohol abuse and Dry January? The Egyptians started the year with a lot of alcohol. Or read this article: Large study shows: every glass of alcohol increases the risk of dementia.
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