Moderate drinking may be a good way to promote cardiovascular health, but the same could be harmful to the brain as it can decrease the brain cell production by 40 percent.
Moderate drinking may be a good way to promote cardiovascular health, but the same could be harmful to the brain as it can decrease the brain cell production by 40 percent, finds a new research. Megan Anderson, a graduate student working with Tracey J. Shors, professor of behavioral and systems neuroscience at the Rutgers University, reported that moderate to binge drinking - drinking less during the week and more on the weekends - damages the structural integrity of the adult brain.
"Moderate drinking can become binge drinking without the person realizing it," said Anderson.
In the short term there may not be any noticeable motor skills or overall functioning problems, but in the long term this type of behavior could have an adverse effect on learning and memory, the journal Neuroscience reported.
Tracey Shors and Anderson worked with postdoctoral fellow Miriam Nokia from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland to model moderate to heavy drinking in humans using rodents that reached a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent - the legal driving limit in the US and many other countries - and found that brain cell production was affected negatively, according to a Rutgers statement.
Researchers discovered that at this level of intoxication in rats - comparable to about 3-4 drinks for women and five drinks for men - the number of nerve cells in the hippocampus of the brain were reduced by nearly 40 percent compared to those in the abstinent group of rodents.
The hippocampus is a part of the brain where the new neurons are made and is also known to be necessary for some types of new learning.
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"It's something that you might not even be aware is occurring."
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Although college students commonly binge drink, according to the institute, 70 percent of binge drinking episodes involved adults age 26 and older.
"This research indicates that social or daily drinking may be more harmful to brain health than what is now believed by the general public," Anderson said.
Source-IANS