THE BRAIN ON ALCOHOL

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Chronicle. Alcohol abuse can lead to significant brain atrophy, or
shrinkage of brain tissue. This atrophy is not uniform across
the brain, though, but tends to affect certain regions more
severely than others, and very crucial regions, such as the
frontal lobes where you have executive functions such as decision making,
impulse control, planning, empathy, emotional regulation, anticipating consequences a whole

(01:25):
lot more. Other areas commonly affected include the cerebellum, which
is important for motor coordination certain cognitive functions, and the hippocampus,
a key structure for memory formation. Brain altrophy and alcoholics
is thought to result from a combination of factors, including
direct neurotoxic effects of alcohol, oxidative stress, and nutritional deficiencies

(01:45):
common in heavy drinkers. While some recovery of brain volume
is possible with sustained abstinence, especially in younger individuals, long
term heavy drinking can lead to permanent loss of brain tissues.
So we'll take a little bit of look at some
of these areas. White matter in the brain consists of myolated,
myolated myelinated axons that connect different brain regions, facilitating communication

(02:09):
between neural networks, and chronic alcohol abuse can lead to
a significant degradation of white matter, a condition known as
alcohol related white matter disease. The white matter degradation is
particularly prominent in the corpus colossoms, the large white matter
tract that connects both hemispheres or your brain. The damage
here can be observed using what they call it a DTI,

(02:30):
which shows reduced fractional aniostrophy. The consequences, what we really
want to know is include slow information processing, impaired cognitive flexibility,
and difficulties focusing and attention and working memory. Another one
has reduced gray matter volume, and the gray matter volume
is observed in various brain regions. Again, the frontal lobes,

(02:52):
including the prefrontal cortex, showing the most consistent reductions. Other
areas include the cingulate cortex and the insular in parts
of the temporal and parietal lobes. The parietal lobes are
responsible for sensory motor issues, so how you're feeling things,
think feeling in your body, muscle movement. Also, temporal lobes

(03:16):
are also responsible for communication, speech, and understanding. The mechanisms
mechanisms behind gray matter loss and alcoholics are complex. The
changes can lead to a range of cognitive and behavioral impairments,
including deficits and executive function emotional regulation and decision making. Obviously,

(03:37):
can also impair ability to speak and understand others. It
also disrupts what they call the default mode network. It's
a set of interconnected brain regions that are active when
an individual is not focused on the environment externally, often
associated with thinking about yourself, self reference what they call
self referential thinking, and autobiogra autobiographical memory basically when you're

(04:00):
thinking about yourself or what's going on. Chronicle alcohol use
can significantly disrupt this functionality functional connectivity within this network.
Alcoholics often show reduced connectivity between key default mode networks
such as the medial prefunnel cortex, posterior singular cortex, and
the inferior paratal lobules. This disruption can manifest as difficulties

(04:24):
and self awareness, which is going to be in the
parietal area, auto biographical memory retrieval in future planning, which
is going to be the pre funnel cortex. Additionally, normal
deactivation of the DMN during task performance may be impaired
in alcoholics. Essentially, potentially contributing to attentional deficits and increased
mind launtering. Those are just some of the areas that

(04:44):
are affected by alcohol. The reduced integrity of the corpus
colossalm can also lead to a range of cognitive and
behavioral impairments. Corpus COLOSSALM connects to the left on the
right sides of the brain. This causes a lot of issues,
including deficits in bi manual coordination, processing of complex visual
auditory information, lots of stuff. So alcohol, and again I'm

(05:10):
not trying to be the bad person here, but alcohol
really has a lot of issues. They can cause some
serious problems over time. And what fools people is that
the damage can it doesn't occur until a long time
that they're drinking. So in other words, let me phrase
that better. They could be drinking fifteen twenty years. That's
when they're really starting noticing the effects of alcohol on

(05:32):
these brain regions. And sometimes you can't recover, so it
isn't immediate like some other drugs. We get impacted immediately
and you can see the damage being done within days.
Alcohol is a slow killer, so be careful, folks.