Imaging Studies Identify Brain Damage In Young Adult, Female Alcoholics.

2001 MAR 8 - (NewsRx.com) -- Specific areas of the brain impaired by years of heavy drinking have been identified in young adult women by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in San Diego.

Previously, investigators have relied on thinking and memory tests to gauge brain dysfunction in alcoholics, but no one had identified the actual brain sites where impairment occurs in young adults.

Published in the February 2001 issue of the Journal of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, the study used sophisticated brain scans called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research was headed by Susan F. Tapert, PhD, UCSD assistant adjunct professor of psychiatry and a clinical psychologist at the VA Medical Center.

"Our findings suggest that even young and physically healthy individuals risk damaging their brains through chronic, heavy use of alcohol," she says.

Tapert notes that characterizing specific areas of brain dysfunction caused by heavy drinking is critical to understanding how and when early alcoholism leads to brain impairment. She adds that her team is conducting further research with teenage boys and girls to determine which brain regions are affected early in the clinical course of alcoholism.

In the published work, Tapert and her team recruited and tested young women 18 to 25 years old with a history of alcohol abuse since adolescence, and a group of same-age women with no history of heavy drinking. Both groups of women had abstained from alcohol for the previous 72 hours.

As the women performed a nonverbal working memory test, the researchers found the alcoholic women had significant abnormalities, especially on the brain's right side, and in the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe, which is located in the upper back portion of the brain. These are areas of the brain previously identified as active when normal individuals perform spatial tasks such as reading maps, doing puzzles, or mentally calculating math problems.