Community/Disease/Health/Hot topics/Uncategorized

Alcohol and Behavior

Posted on by / 1 Comment

Anyone who has drank alcohol or been around people who are drinking alcohol are familiar with some of the effects it has on behavioral and physical attributes. People lose some of the inhibitions, become flushed in the face, and the more alcohol consumed the more affected you become. Consumption of large quantities of alcohol is portrayed in the media as a normal activity for adults, young adults, and now in many shows teenagers. The excessive use of alcohol as a social stimulant can be seen reflected in many drinking statistics such as these 2011 CDC statistics about high school students, during the past 30 days:

  • 9% drank some amount of alcohol.
  • 22% binge drank.
  • 8% drove after drinking.
  • 24% rode with a driver who had been drinking alcohol. 1

Alcohol in the Brain
A little bit about how alcohol (the compound ethanol) works in the brain. The mechanism is fairly complicated, and as in all situations, not everything is known about how ethanol impacts the brain, but currently the hypothesis is a “two wave” system. The first wave occurs when the alcohol interacts with targets in the brain such as NMDA and GABA receptors, inhibiting inhibitory neurons, thus decreasing inhibition, a common affect that is association with alcohol consumption. The second wave occurs after these receptors are activated. It is believed to activate the reward system in the brain, including endocannabinoid, opiid, and monoamine receptors. Researchers believe that the second wave is responsible for the reward and reinforcement of consumption.
Underage drinking leading to addiction
One of the major risk factors that the paper mentioned was the amount and frequency of consumption, i.e. drinking to get drunk, which is a common practice, especially for younger users, high school and college age kids. In the earlier statistics I mentioned that 22% of the high school students surveyed had binged in the past 30 days. In a social environment where image is important and there is a large social pressure to drink, and drink copious amounts, it can be hard to find personal limits and not get into the habit of drinking past those limits frequently. This in turn can lead to problems down the road of not knowing how to drink just one glass of wine, or one beer with dinner, because all you know is drinking for the drunk sensation. With the habit forming components of the second wave that give reward for these behaviors, it is not hard to see how large consumption at younger ages can lead to bad lifetime drinking habits.

Another part of this problem is the stigma that surrounds drinking with the age limit of 21 years. Similar to many things that we are not allowed to do, this age restriction entices many to try alcohol and participate in illegal activity. Being introduced to alcohol by family and in circumstances outside of peer pressure to binge drink could help to slow this problem and show that drinking alcohol can be done in a social capacity without getting drunk. While this is optimistic, and many people have family members who get drunk when they drink, so this may not be the optimal introduction to alcohol, I know that my drinking habits (disclaimer, I am over 21) have been largely affected by the way that my parents treated alcohol while I was growing up. It’s a reminder that kids (young and old) are constantly looking at the behaviors of the adults around them as social cues and are learning, and often emulating those choices.
 
1) http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/underage-drinking.htm

Community/Disease/Health/Hot topics

"A"lways "U"nique "T"otally "I"nteresting "S"ometimes "M"ysterious

Posted on by / 0 Comment

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a range of conditions classified as pervasive developmental disorders which include autism, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), childhood disintegrative disorder, and Rett syndrome. Most patients are diagnosed between the ages of 2 to 4. And some common characteristics shared these disorders are social deficits, communication difficulties, stereotyped or repetitive behaviors and interests, and sometimes even cognitive delays. According to the study done by the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, about 1 in 88 children has been identified with an ASD in the United States. This approximately 1% prevalence of ASDs is also shared across Europe, as well as some Asian countries.  Therefore, ASDs have become a global problem which scientists from all over the world are trying to understand and come up with treatments for. In the paper we read for this week, the authors studied the environmental and genetic factors as well as the neurochemical mechanism of ASDs and proposed a hypothesis regarding to the issue, the redox/methylation hypothesis.
Due to the evidences of oxidative stress and impaired methylation found in most of the autistic children, the authors went over the metabolic relationship between oxidative stress and methylation and focused on the activity of methionine synthase. According to the authors, genetic risk factors and environmental exposures combined could cause impaired sulfur metabolism, which will induce so called oxidative stress in the patients’ brain. The oxidative stress then decreases the activity of methionine synthase and ultimately causes lowered attention and cognition, as well as developmental delays result from alternation in gene expressions, the common symptoms seen in ASDs.
According to Lauren, most of the current treatments for ASDs are different kinds of therapies including Behavioral and communication, Educational, and family therapies. The medications that are available can only help controlling the symptoms. Therefore, if this hypothesis is true, this piece of information can be really helpful for the scientists and pharmaceutical companies to develop new treatments for ASDs.
Two summers ago, I worked as a TA at the summer camp hosted by the YMCA. There was a little boy who suffers from autism in my class that I was told to pay special attention to. In the beginning to this summer camp, I noticed that this little boy would not pay attention in class and he would often get into fights with other kids. He was seen as the “trouble maker” by most of the TAs including myself. But as I got to know him better and better, I found out that he was actually often reading higher level readings or drawing all those amazing pictures that not even an untrained adult (like me) could draw. And I realized that most autistic kids are just like normal kids if not smarter, and all they lack are the ability to socialize and to express what they have in their minds. Therefore, if we can successfully come up with new treatments for ASDs, maybe one day we will be able to see and hear the beautiful minds of the autistic children.
 
 

Uncategorized

Reflection on the Capstone Experience

Posted on by / 0 Comment

I came into the Neurochemistry class not knowing what to expect. I thought that it would be like all the other classes I have enrolled in at Concordia College, where the teacher would come in dumping all this information on us, expecting us to take lots of notes and then test us on what we could cram into our brains.  Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised and relieved that it wasn’t like any class I have taken.  Starting each week with a new topic and new questions led me to think about things that I would not normally take time to think about.  Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, Concussions, Bipolar, Obesity, Ethanol and lastly Autism, all topics that I knew very little about until we discussed them in class.  Coming in Mondays having read the article and going through the things that didn’t make sense to us or needed further explanation than what the paper gave.  Then dividing out these topics among the class to return Wednesday being “The Expert” in the topic given that Monday.   Wednesday was devoted to presenting our topic to the class to help everyone have a more full understanding of the paper for the week.  Then came Friday, the day where we assign discussion leaders and take the topic for the week and discuss everything from ways we think we could treat the disorder to the morals of certain treatment methods to how the things presented in the paper applied to everyday life.  This day was devoted to expressing our opinions, stories, and hypotheses and seeing what the other people in the group had to say.  The discussion was not structured in any way and tangents were taken many times and that was encouraged because it kept us attentive and listening to others ideas.  It is all these things above that made this class a welcome relief to the hectic life of a college student.  It was a very intensive course that didn’t feel intensive.
I have learned many things in this class.  I have learned so much about the diseases and disorders we discussed and now have become more educated in the effects certain actions in my life have.  I feel better capable of expressing my ideas to others even though I still am very frightened to speak in front of a group as many people are.  I have become familiar with the basics of neuro- and biochemistry with regard to neurological related diseases and disorders and I feel that I can use this understanding to appreciate how the diseases and disorders are researched and treated.  I feel that even though I may not go into a field relating to Neurochemistry or Biochemistry after I graduate from Concordia, I can use all the information that I have gained from this class to help make informed decisions in my life.
The reason we have the Capstone course is to provide a class where you can discuss your experiences over the last 4 years and apply it to topics that pertain to the brain.  I believe that Neurochemistry has accomplished just that and more.  It provided an environment in which we could express our ideas and see what others thought as well.  Even though we may have had very differing ideas, the discussion never deviated into the realm of arguing and things like that.  Ultimately, what this final post is saying is that I am glad that I decided to take this course and experience discussion on such a wide variety of topics and be able to publish my thoughts on the internet for people to read and reply to.

Community/Health/Hot topics

Autism and the Boy with the Incredible Brain

Posted on by / 0 Comment

This week, in our final discussion for the year, we talked about a topic that has gained more and more attention as the years have gone by.  This topic is autism, the developmental disorder that affects children at a very young age.  This disorder is considered a spectrum disorder that ranges from Classical Autism to Asperger’s Syndrome to Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.   In children who develop autism, it isn’t noticed right away that anything is wrong.  It isn’t until the child gets to the stage where they should be developing social skills such as babbling and reacting to their name.  It isn’t until they fail to develop those skills at certain ages that the parents notice something is off and take their child to the doctor.
A hypothesis that has been suggested is that the child is born normal with no signs of anything wrong, then a little while later the brain grows larger than normal.  The body, noticing that the brain is larger than it should be, starts “pruning” down the number of neurons, causing a type of stress in the brain.  This stress isn’t the “Oh no, I have a test tomorrow and I have yet to study” type of stress.  This stress is referred to as oxidative stress, which means that cells have too many reactive species and they can’t keep up in getting rid of them.  This causes many processes to be activated or inhibited that causes a change in how the brain should develop and manifests in the impaired social development we see in autistic kids.  Another that can arise from autism is that the kid has extreme focus when it comes to certain things and almost no focus for pretty much everything else.  While this is not usually a good thing, good things can arise from this very specialized focus.
An example that comes to mind is Daniel Tammet, who has been called the Boy with the Incredible Brain.  Daniel is in his 30’s and was diagnosed with autism and then Asperger’s at age 25.   Even though he has Asperger’s, he is incredibly smart and his “focus” that he has is with languages and numbers.  He has been studied all over the world by many scientists that aim to unlock this power that Daniel has.  The power that he has is that he can memorize and calculate extremely complicated things.  For instance, he learned Icelandic in a week and was put on TV to see if he could sustain a conversation live with the newspeople.  For those of you who don’t know, Icelandic has been said to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest languages to learn as a second language.  And he did it in a week, where an average person would take months even years of training to get to where he did.  Another fixation that Daniel has is with numbers.   He sees numbers differently than the average person.  He has what is called synesthesia, which means that two or more senses you have combine and you experience both at the same time even though one of the senses shouldn’t be activated.  For Daniel, when he hears a number, he sees shapes and colors that go with that number and no 2 numbers are the same.  Also on the topic of numbers, Daniel has memorized over 22,000 digits of pi and recited them back after only 1 reading.
Anyway, why I bring up Daniel is because we think of autism as a developmental disorder that ruins the life of the child and they will be behind other kids in development.  Daniel is an example of how, yes you can have autism (or any disorder on the spectrum), but you can also take that disability and turn it into a good thing.  For Daniel, he took the obsessive nature he had with numbers and memorizing and turned it into a reason to help people by writing books and allowing himself to be researched.  As a side note, I recommend watching the documentary on Daniel Tammet called The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

Health/Hot topics

Alcohol: How Much Is Too Much?

Posted on by / 0 Comment

When you think of alcohol what do you think of? A glass of wine with dinner? A beer after work with colleagues? Or maybe a Saturday night out with friends? You probably do not, however, think of alcohol as a drug similar to nicotine. Whatever your thoughts are of alcohol there is some important information you must know when choosing your drink.
Alcohol is a drug and can have many negative effects on your body. Also, because it is a drug, alcohol abuse can lead to addiction. But what exactly are the negative effects of alcohol and how might alcohol abuse be treated?
Alcohols Negative Effects
The alcohol that we drink is made from a chemical compound called ethanol. When introduced to the body, ethanol produces many outward side effects which are commonly known. These include: improved mood, increased self-confidence and sociability, decreased anxiety and attention span, flushed skin, and impaired judgment. Ethanol consumption also has effects on the brain that cannot be outwardly seen. Ultimately, it ends up interrupting many signaling pathways and kinase cascades. Ethanol effects things like protein kinase A, protein kinase C and NMDA receptors which all play roles in controlling a wide spread range of things from memory to digestion. These interactions in the brain are responsible for alcohol reinforcement and reward. The specific methods in which ethanol produces these effects are still unknown.
Treatment of Alcohol Abuse
Because alcohol effects neuronal factors, it is possible that alcohol abuse could be treated through drug therapy. One specific area which has been researched is using a drug that will inhibit PKC. This could work because in animal models, inhibition of PKC cause a decrease in self-administration of alcohol. Meaning if PKC was inhibited in humans, it is possible that the desire for alcohol would be lowered causing less alcohol consumption. Currently there is no drug treatment for alcoholism.
How Much Is Too Much?
One of the things I found most interesting about this week’s discussion was talking about what qualifies a person as an alcoholic. This topic came up when someone questioned whether someone who had a glass of wine every night with dinner or went out for one beer every day after work was considered an alcoholic. I had never really thought about what I defined alcoholism as. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an alcoholic as “a person affected with alcoholism.” Alcoholism is defined as “continued excessive or compulsive use of alcoholic drinks.” Although that seems straightforward, who gets to decide what is excessive. As a class we came up with ideas such as when it is affecting your daily life or when having wine with dinner is a ‘have to’ thing rather than a ‘want to’ thing you might have problems with alcoholism. I think the definition that we discussed that appealed to me the most was that if a person is hiding their drinking or drinking alone they are likely ashamed of how much alcohol they are consuming  and aware that it is not healthy.  I think that the definition of alcoholism is a personal thing and the question of how much is too much has a different answer for each person.
 
If you think you or someone you know may have problems with alcohol abuse please talk to someone about possible treatment options.

Disease/Health/Hot topics

Is There An Easy Solution To Your Growing Waistline?

Posted on by / 0 Comment

Obesity: a rising epidemic in American culture. But what is the solution? Diet and exercise clearly come to mind as well as possible surgery in some cases, but if you could take a prescription to help you lose weight, would you?
Our article this week was on the way obesity is affected by leptin. You may be asking, what is leptin and how is it used in the body? Leptin is a hormone naturally found in the body that plays a role in making you feel full. Certain sugars that are commonly found in processed foods, like high fructose corn syrup, slow down the release of leptin. This means that if your diet is high in leptin suppressing sugars, you will not feel full as fast and will therefore eat more. So the question is, would a supplementing leptin into the body as well as cutting back on foods that cause leptin suppression help with weight loss?
Based on the basic knowledge I just provided, you are probably thinking “yes that sounds like an excellent idea!” However, it has been tested and unfortunately, the tests failed. In essence what happens when adding leptin into the body, is the body becomes immune. Meaning the leptin therapy will work for a while, but higher and higher dosages will be necessary over time in order to continue getting weight loss results. Also, upon discontinuing leptin therapy, the person will end up binge eating as their body will not recognize the natural level of leptin in the body and will therefore not signal that the person is full.
Unfortunately what I am saying is there is no miracle solution.  Diet and excersise are still the healthiest and most effective ways of dealing with obesity. As I have discussed already, however, research shows that there may be more than just a poor diet and exercise plan contributing to the obesity epidemic. And just because supplementing leptin does not appear to be a miracle fix, there is nothing to say that further research will not find a way to aid in weight loss.
Something that can be effective is cutting back on highly processed foods that contain high fructose corn syrup as these slow the release of leptin as I stated earlier. Not only does high fructose corn syrup cause leptin suppression, it can also be hard to digest. Fructose is a sugar found naturally in many foods, especially fruits. However, many people have problems digesting even the natural form of fructose and eventually need to cut all fructose out of their diet. High fructose corn syrup is a highly processed form of fructose that is found in close to every processed food available for purchase from cereals to fruit juices. For this reason, as you can imagine, developing fructose intolerance can be very difficult to deal with.
So what can you do to help achieve your weight loss goals? For now, eat healthy and exercise daily and maybe one day there will be an easier fix to your growing waistline.
 
For more information on the biggest sources of high fructose corn syrup in your diet see: http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/5-sources-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup-in-your-diet.html

Uncategorized

What if we cured the societal plague that is obesity? Would it really benefit us, or would it hurt us?

Posted on by / 1 Comment

Paralleling the advancement of society and increasing level of civilization has been the rise of obesity and overnutrition. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than one third (35.7%) of adults in the United States are obese. Obesity is a source of many health-related problems including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, some of the leading causes of preventable death. There have been many efforts to cure this societal plague but mostly in vain. These efforts have included new diets coming out every year, new and easier exercises, and even pills that claim to shed the pounds for you. It is true that when you exercise and diet that this is one of the most effective ways to lose weight but in today’s fast-paced society people are no longer making time to exercise or construct a new diet. It is much easier to take a pill and let something else do the work for you. Recent studies have been moving toward this venue of treatment for obesity. It seems that we are getting close to something that could lose weight for us allowing a freedom of lifestyle not burdened by diet and exercise. But, what would this mean to society and the way we live? Would it truly be a benefit or could it burden us further?
Over the past decade researchers have found that the hormones insulin and leptin are possible regulators of body fat levels (body adiposity). These two hormones are very independent of one another within our bodies but they show overlapping themes in energy homeostasis. Defects in either of these may result in a poor ability to manage energy homostasis and glucose metabolism. There is a hypothesis that the two are subject to “cross-talk,” both activating the phosphatydalinostitol 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathway. Identification of the key early molecular events mediating the action of insulin and leptin could result in new insight into obesity treatment. One of the more promising treatments coming from this research is the fact that leptin is able to reduce food intake. If more was understood about this process we could potentially prescribe leptin treatment reducing the amount of food intake of a patient. We could eventually really have something here.
But what would this mean for society? If a “cure” for obesity were to be found it could drastically change how our world works. This treatment would potentially place the majority of the population at a healthy weight allowing them to increase their productivity in society. These people will most likely be happier, have more energy, have a higher self-esteem, etc. As lifespan increases as a result of the healthy body-weight productivity of these citizens would also be longer. These people would be less likely to get heart disease and therefore be healthier, longer. The amount of unhealthy people would potentially drastically decrease as those with higher weights were allowed an easy way to lose their weight. Despite its appeal, this may create a world that we might not like. Even though productivity would be expected to increase, would we become lazier people since all we would have to do is take a pill and be skinnier? Many would relish in the ability to opt out of working out to maintain a healthy body weight. What would become of the food industry? This could likely go either way. Would food industries’ income drastically increase because people are no longer afraid of what they eat? It could go the other way and the leptin treatment would cause people to eat much less leading to the food industry losing money. It would be very interesting to observe what direction they would go with the change in societal obesity.
Despite the desire to “cure” obesity allowing many to live out more comfortable and healthier lives, there are potentially many consequences. If we were to come up with a miracle pill to end obesity would it be ethical to withhold it from society out of fear of change or should we embrace the change and adapt?

Community/Disease/Health/Hot topics

The Factors of Autism Increases

Posted on by / 0 Comment

The prevalence of autism has increased dramatically over the past few decades, along with the rise of fast food, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. With this rise in autism rates, there has been a deeper delve into what could be causing it, which has been mostly attributed to environmental factors, such as xenobiotics and heavy metals contained in elevated levels within autism patients’. Just as well, there are still rare genetic cases of autism that rely on purely genetic factors to lead to autism. Environmental factors play little to no role in these cases, so raising autism patients correctly is vital. With little research funds pushed towards autism currently relative to other diseases, where would these endowments be better served? Obviously, researching both sides would be optimal, but when faced with funding environmental factors with genetic risk factors versus genetic cases and better social environments, one will be funded more than the other.
The case with heavy metals and xenobiotics in autism patients is a combination situation. Genetic predispositions, but not a pure autism gene alone, are present that react in a manner with environmental factors that have changed over time, such that autism arises. Causation of these includes heavy metals and xenobiotics in patients in levels higher than non-autistic persons. These elevated levels have been attributed to cause oxidative stress in the brain, which, in particular pathways, leads to greater risks of developing autism in genetically prone individuals. Prevention of these could be to lower exposure to heavy metals and xenobiotics. Risks can be lowered by avoiding xenobiotics, which are any chemicals not normally found in the body, such as from pharmaceuticals and food toxins, and heavy metals, like aluminum, lead, and others, that are found in almost every possible processed product in America. Prevention of the heavy metal exposure would obviously be to place stricter regulations on products that contain these heavy metals, such that they would be produced with lesser amounts. Trying to avoid pharmaceuticals, foods, and chemicals that lead to autism could aid in xenobiotic avoidance. The vital role of understanding oxidative stress in the brain would also be of extreme use, because a safer pharmaceutical could be developed to aid in treating combination autism so that prevalence could be lowered in those vulnerable to environmental factors.
Another method of going about treating would be to examine healthy methods of living for those with genetic autism, or even combination-factored autism. Currently, there are no restrictions or real guidelines for parents with autistic children to raise their children. While parents have every legal right to bring up their children however they choose, for those with physical or mental illnesses, medical advice should be taken into serious consideration as well. School programs help autistic students to maintain a schedule and enforce guidelines as reminders for socially acceptable behaviors. They also inform parents of these methods they have carried out, typically, in hopes that parents will also carry them out. This is up to the parents whether or not they will carry them out, and unfortunately, some parents of autistic students choose to take the easy way out and negate the advice from special needs professionals at these schools. This is a purely personal interpretation of this information, but I feel that it would be well advised for parental guidelines to be legally implemented so that severely autistic children could be raised with acceptable behaviors that are non-harmful to those around them. Whether one method will be carried out or another, I feel that there are certain steps that could be taken to better the lives of families with autistic children, and the autistic patients themselves.

Community/Health

Is alcoholism a forever problem in the U.S.?

Posted on by / 0 Comment

Alcohol and the problem of alcoholism has been a problem for years and this problem is definitely not on the decline.  Our society today in the U.S. seems to be adopting alcohol consumption as a major part of social interactions, making it socially expectable for individuals to consume copious amounts of alcohol and act silly.  Throughout the past week our neurochemistry class has been diving deep into a paper that talks about just what alcohol does in the body and also yields new information on some possible ways to fix this growing problem of alcoholism.
 
The main point of the alcohol review that we dissected regarding the neurochemical systems involved talked about the two separate waves of responses due to alcohol consumption.  The first hit of the alcohol acts on specific targets in the brain resulting in the stimulating properties of the drug triggering the intoxication signals such as sedation and hypnosis.  The second wave of the alcohol consumption comes with effects on a variety of neurotransmitters and neuropeptide systems such as NMDA receptors and GABA, causing NMDA receptors to be inhibited and GABA to be increased.  This second wave primarily involves monoamines, opioids, and endocannabinoids.  The second wave is the main one that is responsible for alcohol reinforcement and reward.  Another very common piece that is important in the effects of alcohol is PKCa.  It is proven that by inhibiting this PKCa it is possible to decrease self-administration of alcohol.
 
Now that we know a bit about how alcohol works in the body and brain we can understand what scientists are looking at when trying to develop a therapy for alcoholism.  One of the main targets is the PKCa that I mentioned before.  There is a possibility that by creating a drug to inhibit this PKCa it would be possible to counteract the want for alcoholics to self-administer alcohol.  This would be a revolutionary therapy as making it possible for alcoholics to not want to consume alcohol would be very beneficial in stopping alcoholism.
 
Although the thought of developing a drug to treat alcoholism sounds very appealing, I feel as if there are better options out there for decreasing our growing problem of alcoholism.  In one of our discussions in class we talked with a couple students that studied abroad in Ireland about the differences in alcohol consumption.  Even though Ireland consumes more alcohol per capita than the US these students felt as if the style of consumption was much different in Ireland and that the US creates a sort of attitude toward alcohol that makes it seem as if we have to drink to get drunk rather than casually drinking socially.  This was a very interesting point that we discussed thoroughly trying to figure out why this is.  The only thing we could narrow down was that the drinking age in Ireland is much lower so it isn’t such a big deal when young adults can finally drink in Ireland, making it feel as if it isn’t near as big a thing.  I’m not saying that lowering the drinking age in the US would decrease the alcohol problem but it is a very interesting topic.
 
All in all it will be very interesting to see if scientists will in fact be able to come up with a drug to counteract alcoholism and whether or not the rate of alcoholism in the US will continue to rise in years to come.

Uncategorized

Alcoholism: Is there a way to control it?

Posted on by / 0 Comment


Alcohol has been around since before the rise of the ancient Egyptian and was used for various reasons which include pleasure, nutrition, medicine rituals, and funerals. However, even in ancient Egypt there are accounts of alcohol abuse being a problem.1 Now fast-forward to today and you can see drinking alcoholic beverages is still popular in society but there are still many problems associated with alcohol abuse.  Through school programs, like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), we are taught about alcohol abuse however education does not seem to be slowing down the number of cases of alcoholism. Could there be a pharmaceutical approach to help people with alcohol abuse? This is what the paper in last week’s neurochemistry class examined.
Although alcohol has been around a long time, researching the effects of alcohol on the nervous system is very complicated. Currently researchers think alcohol is acting as a “two wave” system. The first part of the wave occurs when alcohol molecules (ethanol) hit specific targets in the brain. These are believed to include NMDA and GABA receptors which are common receptors in the brain. Once these receptors are activated the “second wave” hits with indirect effects on a variety of neurotransmitter and neuropeptide systems. Scientists believe endocannabinoids, opioids, and monoamines are important molecules responsible for the feelings of reward and reinforcement from alcohol consumption and they act through these neurotransmitter and neuropeptide systems. Although this information is a good start, much is still unknown about how alcohol affects the brain.
Since scientists are still trying to unravel the mystery of how alcohol is directly and indirectly affecting the brain it is unrealistic to expect an affective anti-alcohol abuse drug soon. So what can be done to slow down alcohol abuse today? Personally, I believe drinking, especially at younger ages, normally occurs in settings which promote large amounts of alcohol to be consumed. Examples of these settings include parties and bars with drink specials. Now I’m all for social drinking but I think the best solution for the US is to create a more relaxed drinking culture where people are more interested in socializing rather than trying to drink one’s fill. I studied abroad in Ireland last semester and the drinking society is very relaxed there. It was more common to go to a pub for one or two drinks with friends instead of going into situations where I felt pressured to drink more because of the environment.  However, daily socializing should not always take place in these setting like in Ireland. Another idea is to make drinking legal in situations where you are with family before the age of 21. I feel like people would be less likely to drink excessively if they are introduced that drinking from family who can show when and how to drink. Instead people are given the power to legally drink and they are unfamiliar with how and when one should drink. I know all people are not this way but I know many have encountered this problem.  Although these suggestions are probably unrealistic, alcohol abuse is still a problem which should receive more attention than it does. However by looking at the past and today one thing is for sure, alcohol consumption will continue to be popular in distant future.
Sources:
1)      http://urbanbeerhunt.com/images/beertoast.jpg
2)      http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/1114796842.html

Spam prevention powered by Akismet