HOW BINGE DRINKING CAN DAMAGE YOUR MEMORY

An article found in today's Daily Mail. I certainly wonder about this, certainly when I was lecturing at college and over hearing the tales of what my students got up to. Week end classes were certainly bad, that's if they turned up, they were generally late or fell asleep. No body is saying the odd drink is bad however moderation is the key. Alcohol is toxic to the liver and cirrhosis of the liver is becoming apparent in young people, it is worrying what a whole generation is doing to themselves

Why binge drinking makes you forgetful - it damages your ability to lay down long-term memories

Students who enjoy regular pub crawls are putting their long-term memory at risk, scientists warn.
A study has found that binge drinking affects the brain's hippocampus, which plays a key role in learning and memory.
This brain structure is particularly sensitive to the poisonous effect of alcohol no matter what your age, which is bad news for heavy drinking undergraduates.

Night on the tiles: Heavy drinking can affect your memory long-term and not just the night after

Lead researcher Dr Maria Parada said: 'We wondered whether hippocampus-dependent learning and memory could be affected by heavy episodic drinking.
'In northern European countries, there is a strong tradition of a sporadic, drunkenness-orientated, drinking style.
'In recent years, the pattern of binge drinking among young people has become more widespread throughout Europe, hence the growing concern about this issue.'
Our long-term memory is split into two types: declarative memory - which is our memory for facts and procedural memory - which is how we know how to physically do something like tie our shoelaces.
Scientists from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain found heavy drinking had a detrimental effect on students' declarative memory.
Those who admitted to indulging in too many pints were not as good at remembering facts.

THE HIPPOCAMPUS

This seahorse-shaped set of neurons is known to be play a role in both writing a working memory and committing it into a long term memory store.
It also connects memories with other memories to give them context. So pictures from your first day at work may be connected with information about the physical surroundings.

Many people with damage to the hippocampus have anterograde amnesia: they can remember the distant past but cannot form new memories. However, they can learn new skills.
The most often quoted case is of H.M. Two thirds of his hippocampus was removed to relieve him of epileptic seizures in 1953.
Doctors then realised that although H.M had memories from before the operation, he could not hold on to any new memories for more than a few seconds.
His story changed scientific understanding about the brain.

Dr Parada said: 'Our main finding was a clear association between binge drinking and a lower ability to learn new verbal information in healthy college students.
'This was even after controlling for other possible confounding variables such as intellectual levels, history of disorders, other drug use, or family history of alcoholism.'
The study examined 122 Spanish university students, aged between 18 and 20, divided into two groups - those who engaged in binge drinking and those who abstained.

They were then subjected to a neuropsychological assessment which included a logical memory subtest to test verbal declarative memory and tests to measure visual declarative memory.
Dr Parada said: 'This (study) allowed us to establish a clearer association between binge drinking patterns and poorer performance on memory tasks.
'One of the factors that appear to be behind this pattern of consumption is the low perception of risk.
'Whereas most attention has focused on negative consequences such as traffic accidents, violence or public disorder, society and students themselves are unaware of the damaging effects binge drinking may have on the brain.'
She added that the study accounted for variables such as genetic vulnerability, or drug use, such as marijuana.
Dr Parada said they would be following the students long-term to see whether drinking could affect academic performance, when taking variables such as class attendance into account.
The findings are published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1387919/Alcohol-Heavy-drinking-university-damages-long-term-memory.html#ixzz1MuC1XY00

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