The study found that even low doses of alcohol prepared the brain for addiction.
How many drinks is too much?
According to a recent rodent study, even tiny amounts of alcohol may cause epigenomic and transcriptomic changes in brain circuitry in a region that is essential for the development of addiction.
The pathways that are involved in setting the brain up for addiction, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are also linked to the highs that come with drinking, such as euphoria and anxiolysis, a state of relaxed but awake sedation.
Subhash Pandey, director of the UIC Center for Research in Alcohol Epigenetics. Credit: Joshua Clark/University of Illinois Chicago
“This suggests that when the brain experiences the anti-anxiety effects of alcohol and the mood lift — the relaxation and the buzz — it is also being primed for alcohol use disorder,” said the study’s senior author Subhash Pandey, the Joseph A. Flaherty endowed professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics in the UIC College of Medicine.
Pandey states that while the research does not, for instance, imply that one drink results in addiction in individuals, it does provide some insights into why certain people are more susceptible to alcohol use disorder.
“We’re seeing that dependent behaviors may not always be from long-term, high-quantity habits but a result of rapid epigenetic changes in the brain, which we show in this study may start happening even at low doses,” said Pandey, who is also a senior research career scientist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
A paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry details Pandey’s experiments, which studied rats under control and alcohol exposure conditions.
In the experiments, rodents were exposed to low concentrations of alcohol, and researchers watched as they navigated a maze. After that, the researchers used
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