How Alcohol Affects the Brain

So, your system prioritizes getting rid of alcohol before it can turn its attention to its other work. If alcohol continues to accumulate in your system, it can destroy cells and, eventually, damage whats a sponsor your organs. You probably already know that excessive drinking can affect you in more ways than one. Dr. Anand stresses the importance of drinking in moderation, if at all. There’s also more of an effect on your brain and its development if you’re younger — one that can have a lasting impact.

Drinking during this time can affect all of these functions and impair memory and learning. Consuming alcohol while pregnant can cause permanent damage to the developing brain and other organs of the fetus. These feel-good hormones are the reason light-to-moderate drinkers feel more relaxed, sociable, and happy when drinking. Together, medication and behavioral health treatments can facilitate functional brain recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous is available almost everywhere and provides a place to openly and nonjudgmentally discuss alcohol issues with others who have alcohol use disorder. And prolonged alcohol use can lead to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.

How Does Alcohol Affect Your Brain?

FASDs interfere with the brain’s growth and development, leading to lifelong physical, mental, and behavioral problems. Here’s a look what actually happens to your brain when you drink. Contributors to this article for the NIAAA Core Resource on Alcohol include the writers for the full article, content contributors to subsections, reviewers, and editorial staff.

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

This makes the risk of long-term and permanent brain damage more likely. While the long-term effects of alcohol on the brain can be quite serious, most of them of the damage is reversible is you stop drinking. alcohol gallbladder Even brain atrophy can start to reverse after a few weeks of avoiding alcohol. You can promote healthy changes in the brains and behaviors of patients with AUD by encouraging them to take a long-term, science-based approach to getting better.

These effects can happen even after one drink — and increase with every drink you have, states Dr. Anand. Alcohol use in minors has been linked to significant shrinkage of the hippocampus and smaller prefrontal lobes than people of the same age that don’t drink. This CME/CE credit opportunity is jointly provided by the Postgraduate Institute for Medicine and NIAAA.

Gut health

Having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at a party here and there isn’t going to destroy your gut. But even low amounts of daily drinking and prolonged and heavy use of alcohol can lead to significant problems for your digestive system. With continued alcohol use, steatotic liver disease can lead to liver fibrosis.

Adolescents are more susceptible to brain damage from alcohol use than adults. Teenagers are likely to engage in high-risk behaviors, such as driving under the influence and using other substances. Blackouts, which impact short-term memory, are also common among adolescents. In a study published in 2018, people who regularly had 10 or more drinks per week can alcoholics eat food cooked with alcohol had one to two years shorter life expectancies than those who had fewer than five drinks. That number increased to four or five years shorter for people who had 18 drinks or more per week. The researchers linked alcohol consumption to various types of cardiovascular problems, including stroke.

Main Content

1. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and clouds judgment, which may lead you to engage in risky behaviors.
2. In a study published in 2018, people who regularly had 10 or more drinks per week had one to two years shorter life expectancies than those who had fewer than five drinks.
3. Research has shown that men and women experience alcohol-induced blackouts at equal rates, although women drink less often and heavily than men.
4. “The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures.

Evidence for human consumption of alcohol dates back over 10,000 years. Consumption of alcohol has and continues to serve major roles in religious and cultural ceremonies around the world. But unlike most food products, in the last century, alcohol has been wrapped up in nearly perpetual controversy over its moral effects and health implications. Your whole body absorbs alcohol, but it really takes its toll on the brain. It is absorbed through the lining of your stomach into your bloodstream.

How Does Heavy Drinking Affect the Brain Long-Term?

More resources for a variety of healthcare professionals can be found in the Additional Links for Patient Care. “Intoxication occurs when alcohol intake exceeds your body’s ability to metabolize alcohol and break it down,” explains Amanda Donald, MD, a specialist in addiction medicine at Northwestern Medicine. When you drink too much alcohol, it can throw off the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gut. Cirrhosis, on the other hand, is irreversible and can lead to liver failure and liver cancer, even if you abstain from alcohol. But when you ingest too much alcohol for your liver to process in a timely manner, a buildup of toxic substances begins to take a toll on your liver. Dr. Sengupta shares some of the not-so-obvious effects that alcohol has on your body.

“The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures. Before you reach for your next drink, Dr. Anand explains how alcohol can affect your brain — not only in the short term, but also in the long run. People who drink regularly may notice that alcohol does not have the same effect on them as it used to.

Over time, excessive drinking can lead to mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety. Alcohol abuse can increase your risk for some cancers as well as severe, and potentially permanent, brain damage. It can lead to Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS), which is marked by amnesia, extreme confusion and eyesight issues.

Alcohol can, therefore, lead to worse memory and impaired judgments, among other changes. While having a drink from time to time is unlikely to cause health problems, moderate or heavy drinking can impact the brain. Alcohol interferes with the brain’s communication pathways and can affect the way the brain looks and works. Alcohol makes it harder for the brain areas controlling balance, memory, speech, and judgment to do their jobs, resulting in a higher likelihood of injuries and other negative outcomes.

The syndrome — not the alcohol — results in a loss of neurons in the brain, causing confusion, memory loss, and loss of muscle coordination. Results of the study showed that people who drank the equivalent of four drinks a day had almost six times the shrinkage as nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers had three times the risk of shrinkage than nondrinkers. Drinking can have long-term effects on your brain, including decreased cognitive function and memory issues. Left untreated, alcohol poisoning can cause permanent brain damage and death. “There is no designated ‘safe’ level of drinking,” says Dr. Donald.

This contributes to blackouts and short-term memory lapses when drinking. Research has shown that men and women experience alcohol-induced blackouts at equal rates, although women drink less often and heavily than men. Even though alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, it can negatively impact them long-term.