Alcohol is a harmful drug and one that may be fatal. In fact, alcohol contributes to about 2.6% of deaths in the United States each year. Alcohol acts on the brain in two ways: by altering its structure and function, and by producing effects that are comparable to those produced by other central nervous system depressants.
Symptoms of alcohol brain damage vary from person to person and are frequently comparable to those caused by other diseases. You can suffer anything from brain shrinkage, impaired brain function, alcohol related dementia, or even kill brain cells from excessive alcohol use. Drinking alcohol puts a person at an increased risk of various health and mental problems the most serious of which is alcohol overdose.
A pregnant woman who drinks can pass on the alcohol use disorder to her child in the form of fetal alcohol syndrome.
How Does Alcohol Consumption Affect Your Body?
Alcohol has both short-term and long-term effects on your body. The first thing it does is suppress the areas of your brain that control basic life-support functions such as heart rate, breathing rate, and gag reflex. When alcohol suppresses these activities, an intoxicated person can choke on his or her vomit and die very easily. Alcohol also impairs the person’s judgment and fine motor skills, so they may not be able to get themselves help.
Alcohol can lead to blackouts, memory lapses during which a person is capable of participating in events but has no recollection of them. This typically occurs when too much alcohol is consumed too quickly – often referred to as ‘binge drinking’.
Drinking also affects the liver. Alcohol abusers are much more likely than non-drinkers to develop cirrhosis, irreversible scarring of the liver that can lead to organ failure and death. Drinking can also weaken your heart muscle and cause cardiomyopathy, often leading to heart failure.
Alcohol also contributes to more than 60 different diseases. These include high blood pressure, stroke, gastrointestinal problems, cancers of the mouth, larynx, esophagus and liver, pancreatitis, and diabetes.
How Alcohol Damages Your Brain Cells
The effects of alcohol on your brain can be even more insidious than they are obvious. The damage that drinking inflicts on your brain cells over time can lead to long-term cognitive impairment.
Alcohol abusers are at risk of suffering structural damage to the brain similar to that experienced by patients with Alzheimer’s disease, although the connection between this and drinking is still not fully understood even after many years of research. According to some studies, alcohol addiction reduces the formation of the enzyme that consolidates memory and learning, which can lead to long-term cognitive damage.
Other research has suggested that alcohol changes the way information is processed by brain cells over time, damaging their ability to communicate with each other. This may be the cause of the memory lapses that are associated with drinking, although more research is required to determine exactly how alcohol affects brain cells.
How Alcohol Affects Your Brain Functioning
Brain damage caused by alcohol abuse can also lead to mental health problems such as anxiety or depression, especially when heavy drinking goes on for long periods of time. This connection may be due to the effect that alcohol has on neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, which carry messages between brain cells and can influence moods.
The damage that drinking inflicts on the brain is also responsible for many emotional and behavioral problems in people who abuse alcohol, including uncontrollable aggression or violence. Alcohol abuse has also been linked to suicides and homicides.
Alcohol Abuse Can Cause Many Other Illnesses in the Brain
Heavy drinking over a period of time can lead to more than just brain damage, however. A study published in 1994 by researchers from McLean Hospital showed that long-term alcohol abusers could suffer a wide range of neurological problems, including a form of brain damage known as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. This disease is caused by a lack of thiamine, a key vitamin which the body needs to process glucose and convert into energy. A shortage of this vital nutrient can lead to neurological problems such as nerve damage and amnesia, as well as mental confusion. Symptoms include severe eye coordination problems, memory loss, disorientation, and hallucinations.
Another disease linked to alcohol abuse is cerebellar degeneration, which can lead to progressive damage to part of the brain responsible for fine movements. The effects of alcohol also contributes to impaired senses in general, including vision problems that are often mistaken for deteriorating eyesight as we age.
What You Should Know About Alcohol Intoxication and the Effects of Alcohol on the Brain
Many people believe that alcohol intoxication is a fairly harmless condition, but in fact, it can quickly become dangerous. According to recent research at the University of Missouri, even very small amounts of alcohol that a person drinks can impair your ability to think clearly and control your body’s movements.
The level of alcohol in your bloodstream peaks just minutes after you take you drink alcohol. However, the amount of time that it takes your body to metabolize only a few drinks depends on several factors, including your overall health, your gender, how much you weigh, what you have eaten recently, and medications or other drugs you may be taking.
Alcohol is absorbed directly into the bloodstream through the walls of your stomach and small intestine. Very little, if any, is lost to the digestive process. Your liver then metabolizes alcohol into a toxic chemical known as acetaldehyde, before finally converting it into carbon dioxide and water.
Unfortunately, this metabolism process can lead to some very unpleasant side effects, especially on an empty stomach.
There are several stages of alcohol intoxication from excessive alcohol consumption:
Subliminal intoxication
This is the first stage of intoxication if your blood alcohol content (BAC) is between 0.01 and 0.05 percent. Although you may not appear to have been drinking, your reaction time, conduct, and judgment might be altered. After one drink, most men and women pass through this phase.
Euphoria
During the early stages of drinking, your brain releases more dopamine. This chemical is linked with pleasure. During euphoria, you may feel relaxed and confident. But the two-way traffic of ideas and information between your frontal lobe and your posterior one may be slowed. This phase occurs when your BAC is between 0.03 and 0.12, which is known as “tipsy.”
Excitement
You are now legally intoxicated if your BAC is between 0.09 and 0.25 at this point in time. The occipital lobe, temporal lobe, and frontal lobe of your brain are all affected by this degree of intoxication. Drinking too much can result in the following undesirable side effects, which are associated with each lobe’s function: blurred vision, slurred speech and hearing, and lack of control, respectively. The parietal lobe, which handles sense perceptions, is also damaged. You may have reduced fine motor control and a sluggish reaction time as a result of this stage. Mood swings, poor judgment, and even nausea or vomiting are common symptoms of this phase.
Confusion
A BAC of 0.18 to 0.3 might be mistaken for disorientation. The cerebellum, which aids with coordination, is affected. As a consequence, you may require assistance walking or standing as a result of this impact on the cerebellum. It’s also possible that you’ll have blackouts at this phase. Additionally, your brain may not be working correctly. This is due to a problem with the hippocampus, which is responsible for creating new memories. You could also have a higher pain threshold, raising your risk of injury.
Stupor.
At 0.25 percent BAC, you might have worrying symptoms of alcohol poisoning. All mental, physical, and sensory processes are at this point severely hampered. The danger of passing out, suffocation, and injury is significant.
Coma.
At 0.35 BAC, you risk going into a coma. Because of limited breathing and circulation, decreased motor activity and reflexes, and compromised motor functions and reflexes
Death.
A BAC of 0.45 or greater can be deadly in cases of alcohol poisoning or failure of the brain to govern bodily functions, according to NHTSA.
Chronic Alcohol Consumption and Permanent Brain Damage: A Vicious Cycle
Heavy drinking over a period of time can also increase the risk of stroke, which is often caused by a blood clot that blocks the blood supply to part of the brain. People who drink heavily are six times more at risk than those who do not drink at all. Alcohol abusers are also almost three times more likely to suffer from high blood pressure than non-drinkers, which puts them at risk of suffering a stroke even if they do not have any other underlying health problems.
Alcohol abuse has the potential to cause many different kinds of brain damage in heavy drinkers. Sometimes these effects can be so subtle that they are not easy to notice, yet they can still have a serious impact on daily life. This is why cutting down on alcohol intake and taking steps to protect the mind from further damage are so important for those who drink heavily or often.
How Much Is Too Much Alcohol Consumption? Is there such a thing as Moderate Alcohol Consumption?
The impact of alcohol on the body is determined by a variety of variables. These include your age, gender, general health, how much you drink, how long you’ve been drinking, and how often you consume alcohol.
Those that drink only occasionally tend to recover once they have stopped drinking. They may, however, make poor decisions with long-term implications such as driving while under the influence, despite their judgment being impaired.
Moderate drinkers, who have one or two drinks each day, are more likely to develop breast cancer. They may be more inclined to violence and accidents as well.
Heavy or continual drinking is defined as consuming more than three drinks per day or seven drinks each week. For ladies, this is more than three drinks a day or seven weekly cocktails. For males, it’s more than four daily beverages or 14 weekly doses of alcohol. For comparison, there are five beverages in a bottle of wine. Heavy or continuous drinking can have long-term consequences.
Can the Brain Recover from Alcohol Related Brain Damage?
The brain, on the other hand, may generally heal. If alcohol abuse is halted in time, a significant amount of the physical damage caused by excessive drinking can be reversed. Tissue damage and healing in all areas of the brain may be observed via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques.
These MRI studies have found that chronic alcohol abuse causes gray matter loss to begin to recover in as little as two weeks. After three months of sobriety, alcoholics exhibited greater brain tissue in a study that examined them after three months of sobriety. However, for individuals who relapsed in the first three months, there were no significant increases in brain tissue, indicating that relapse into heavy drinking causes the accelerated regeneration to reverse.
After six months of continuous sobriety or a modest return to alcohol use, researchers discovered that the brain tissue of recovering alcoholics continued to grow, suggesting that damage is mainly caused by heavy or continual drinking.
Healed brain tissue improves cognitive performance in the same way that traumatic brain injury causes cognitive impairment. In addition to improvements resulting from restored brain tissue, some cognitive improvement can be attributed to the brain’s adaptation to the damage and the formation of new pathways to complete tasks affected by alcohol abuse-induced neural pathway disruptions.
The most apparent cognitive improvement occurs after a year of sobriety, although longer periods of sobriety result in greater changes. A meta-analysis of 12 cognitive areas in alcoholics found that overall cognitive function improved significantly following one year of continuous sobriety, with only small differences between alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects.
According to a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, attention and working memory were considerably enhanced among patients who had remained sober for at least one year, as opposed to those who had been sober for less than a year.
Get Help From Alcohol Abuse
Regardless of how long you’ve had an alcohol problem, now is the ideal moment to quit drinking. Quitting drinking might aid in the reversal of some alcohol-related brain damage, prevent early mortality, and lower your risk of additional harm.
Alcoholism is not a moral failing. And quitting drinking necessitates the proper combination of mental health services, including therapy. The right environment may also have a significant impact, so keep people and locations that stimulate you to drink away from you.
In some cases, inpatient rehabilitation provides a setting where starting sobriety feels more doable.
