After a person with alcohol use disorder stops consuming alcohol, damage to the white matter of the brain can continue to progress for weeks following, according to a new study published in JAMA Psychiatry. This runs counter to previous assumptions that changes begin to normalize immediately after stopping alcohol consumption.
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The research was performed by researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience CSIC-UMH, in Alicante, and the Central Institute of Mental Health of Mannheim, in Germany. For the study, they recruited 90 patients with an average age of 46 years who had been hospitalized due to an alcohol use disorder. A group of 36 men with an average age of 41 years with no alcohol problems was used as a control.
It was important that the alcohol use group be hospitalized individuals as this meant that they were being monitored to ensure they consumed no alcohol.
The brains of the two groups were imaged using MRI and the researchers were surprised to find alcohol-induced damage to the white matter in the brain continuing a week after alcohol consumption stopped. A follow-up MRI revealed that white matter in the brain was still changing up to six weeks after all drinking had ceased.
The damages during the period of abstinence affected mainly the right hemisphere and frontal area of the brain and indicate that microstructural alterations begin to revert to normal immediately after drinking is stopped, as previously believed.
A similar study performed simultaneously in addiction-prone rats revealed similar changes.
The researchers plan to continue this line of research into the future to try to characterize the inflammatory and degenerative processes involved in alcohol-induced damage in the early abstinence phase.
Image: Microstructural changes in brain white matter in human alcoholics (a) and alcohol exposed rats (b), measured using the diffusion tensor imaging to provide an index of microstructural integrity. The observed changes further progress after two weeks of abstinence in both species, as shown in panels c for humans, and d for rats. The results challenge the current view that alterations in the brain begin to normalize immediately after quitting alcohol and warn that persistent brain deficits can occur much earlier than is currently believed. Image courtesy of Silvia de Santis.