Teen Drinking May Lead to Irreversible Brain Damage
A recent study led by a University of California, San Diego neuroscientist suggests that teen drinking may lead to irreversible brain damage.
Susan Tapert and colleagues compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't. They found that teens who drink heavily sustain damage to brain nerve tissue, which negatively affects attention span in boys and the ability to comprehend and interpret visual information in girls.
Tapert commented on the findings: "First of all, the adolescent brain is still undergoing several maturational processes that render it more vulnerable to some of the effects of substances.
"For girls who had been engaging in heavy drinking during adolescence, it looks like they're performing more poorly on tests of spatial functioning, which links to mathematics, engineering kinds of functions.
"For boys who engaged in binge drinking during adolescence, we see poor performance on tests of attention -- so being able to focus on something that might be somewhat boring, for a sustained period of time."
For the study, the researchers looked at 12- to 14-year-olds before they used drugs or alcohol. Over time, some of the teens began drinking, a few rather heavily. Tapert's team compared those who began drinking with those who did not, and found that the binge drinkers performed significantly worse on cognitive tests.
Tapert explains that the result actually surprised her: "These results were actually surprising to me because the binge drinking kids hadn't, in fact, engaged in a great deal of binge drinking. They were drinking on average once or twice a month, but when they did drink, it was to a relatively high quantity of at least four or five drinks an occasion."
(Source: www.wbur.org)
Labels: binge drinking, brain damage, teen drinking
posted by Aspen Education Group @ 9:31 AM
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