Neuroscience: The Brain in Addiction and Recovery National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIAAA

For starters, too much alcohol can interfere with neurogenesis, which is your body’s ability to make new brain cells. In short, alcohol use during adolescence can interfere with structural and functional brain development and increase the risk for AUD not only during adolescence but also into adulthood. To help clinicians prevent alcohol-related harm in adolescents, NIAAA developed a clinician’s guide that provides a quick and effective screening tool (see Resources below). Prenatal alcohol exposure can cause brain damage, leading to a range of developmental, cognitive, and behavioral problems, which can appear at any time during childhood. Alcohol can disrupt fetal development at any stage during a pregnancy—including at the earliest stages and before a woman knows she is pregnant.

Core Resource on Alcohol

These contributors included both experts external to NIAAA as well as NIAAA staff. Steatotic liver disease used to go by the name fatty liver disease. Your liver detoxifies and removes alcohol from your blood through a process known as oxidation. When your liver finishes that process, alcohol gets turned into water and carbon dioxide. And that’s on top of the toll that alcohol use can take on relationships, not to mention the potential for financial strain and legal troubles.

It’s not entirely clear to what extent brain cells can grow back. Research has shown that there’s no safe level of alcohol consumption. Even low levels of alcohol consumption can harm your health, and high levels have even worse effects. Read on to learn how alcohol affects the brain in the short- and long-term.

The toll that frequent alcohol use can have on your body can be severe but in some cases, the damage can be reversible. You’ve had a stressful day and want to unwind with a glass of wine. The prefrontal lobe is the part of the brain that undergoes the most change during the substance use group activities teen years and is responsible for judgment, planning, decision making, language, and impulse control.

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As anyone who’s consumed alcohol knows, ethanol can directly influence brain function. Ethanol is classified as a “depressant” because it has a generally slowing effect on brain activity through activation of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) pathways. So why is it so hard to know whether alcohol is good or bad for us—especially for our brains?

The reasons for such recommendations are many, but, by and large, they tend to stem from a study someone read about or saw reported in the news. “When you drink alcohol, it makes you a little bit more talkative. But as you drink more — and you don’t need to drink that much more — eventually, the enzymes that break down the alcohol get saturated. So, the alcohol builds up quite quickly,” explains addiction psychiatrist Akhil Anand, MD. And mixing alcohol and suboxone if you have one too many alcoholic drinks, you may start to slur your speech and have trouble walking in a straight line — and that’s all before dealing with a hangover the next day.

What do healthcare professionals who work with adolescents need to know about alcohol?

1. With repeated heavy drinking, however, tolerance develops and the ability of alcohol to produce pleasure and relieve discomfort decreases.
2. With continued alcohol use, steatotic liver disease can lead to liver fibrosis.
3. While having a drink from time to time is unlikely to cause health problems, moderate or heavy drinking can impact the brain.
4. Alcohol-related brain impairment (ARBI) is long-term brain damage that kills brain cells and impairs memory.

Others may have a hard time sticking to this limit due to genetics, stress, and other risk factors. Research has found an increased prevalence of AUD and heavy drinking, primarily among women. Talk to a healthcare provider if you have a history of addiction or dependence.

Misuse of alcohol during adolescence can alter brain development, potentially resulting in long-lasting changes in brain structure and function. Even drinking a little too much (binge drinking) on occasion can set off a chain reaction that affects your well-being. Lowered inhibitions can lead to poor choices with lasting repercussions — like the end of a relationship, an accident or legal woes. Each of those consequences can cause turmoil that can negatively affect your long-term emotional health. “Some people think of the effects of alcohol as only something to be worried about if you’re living with alcohol use disorder, which was formerly called alcoholism,” Dr. Sengupta says. Alcohol affects the hippocampus, which helps create new memories, in your brain.

You build up a tolerance over time and do not feel as good as you once did with the same amount of alcohol. High alcohol consumption can damage your brain and the rest of your body. Alcohol is a neurotoxin that can affect your brain cells directly and indirectly. It enters your bloodstream immediately and reaches your brain within five minutes of drinking it. And it typically takes only 10 minutes to start feeling some of the effects.

Alcohol reaches your brain in only five minutes, and starts to affect you within 10 minutes. The morning after a night of over-imbibing can cause some temporary effects on your brain. Things like trouble concentration, slow reflexes and sensitivity to bright lights and loud sounds are standard signs of a hangover, and evidence of alcohol’s effects on your brain. That’s because your body already has processes in place that allow it to store excess proteins, carbohydrates and fats.

WKS is a brain disorder caused by a thiamine deficiency or lack of vitamin B-1. Conversely, other recent data suggest a lower risk for dementia in people consuming a few alcoholic beverages a day. This includes a 2022 study showing that in around 27,000 people, consuming up to 40 grams of alcohol (around 2c-b-fly 2.5 drinks) a day was linked to a lower risk for dementia versus abstinence in adults over age 60. A much larger study of almost 4 million people in Korea noted that mild to moderate alcohol consumption was linked to a lower risk for dementia compared to non-drinking. Underage drinking increases the risk of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, which can affect the brain long-term. Heavy drinking may weaken parts of the brain that are responsible for cognitive function and emotion regulation.

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A study published in 2021 found that heavy drinking may lead to loss of brain volume. The researchers noted that people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) had less brain matter than others. The affected brain regions controlled skills like attention, language, memory, and reasoning.

Heavy drinking slows the cerebral cortex, which takes in and processes new information in your brain. Alcohol also dulls sensory uptake, so it might be difficult to take in new information. Damaged regions of the brain can start to “light up” on brain scans after you cut back on drinking, but there are limits. It may take several months of complete abstinence from alcohol to give your brain time to heal. Alcohol increases the effects of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), for example.