Alcoholism does not only affect the brain of the drinker but also of his offspring. These will develop the same mechanisms that lead to addiction.
Suffer the harm of alcoholism without having touched a drop of alcohol. A new US study suggests that just having a relative with an alcohol use disorder affects how your brain transitions from an active state to a resting state. Their results were published in the journal NeuroImage.
The brain reconfigures itself as a computer
Researchers have found that the brain reconfigures between performing different tasks, including between performing a mentally demanding task and resting. This reconfiguration is similar to that of a computer. “The moment you close a program, a computer needs to remove it from memory, reorganize the cache, and possibly flush some temporary files.analyzes Joaquín Goñi who participated in the study. It helps the computer prepare for the next task.”
This computer analogy is not found in people with a family history of alcohol use disorder. The researchers observed that this reconfiguration does not occur in their brains. Although this lack of transition between two tasks does not seem to affect how well a person performs the mentally demanding task themselves, it could give rise to behaviors associated with addiction. In particular, study subjects without this brain process showed greater impatience in expectation of rewards, which is a behavior associated with addiction.
No reconfiguration in children of alcoholics
To conduct their study, the researchers analyzed the brains of 54 participants, half of whom had a parent with an alcohol use disorder. They measured their brain activity while they performed a mentally demanding task on a computer — they had to unpredictably hold back from pressing a left or right key — and then when they were resting while looking at a fixed point on the screen. The researchers also observed, without measuring brain activity, how participants responded to rewards, asking questions such as whether they wished they had $20 now or $200 a year from now.
The researchers observed in the results the different patterns of brain connectivity between completion of the mentally demanding task and entering the resting state. Data from people without a history of family alcoholism revealed that these patterns of brain connectivity reconfigured within the first three minutes after completing the task in a process involving multiple parts of the brain, before disappearing during the fourth minute of rest. “These brain regions talk to each other and are very strongly involved in the task, even if at this stage the task has already been completed. It almost seems like an echo in time of what happened”observed David Kareken, researcher who participated in the study.
For people with a family history of alcoholism, the lack of brain reconfiguration is added to other risk factors consistent with the development of addictive behavior, such as alcoholism. Depression and impatience for reward are at the forefront of these factors. “In the past, we have assumed that a person who does not drink excessively is a healthy control for a study. However, this work shows that someone with just a family history of alcoholism may also have subtle differences in how their brain works.”concludes Joaquín Goñi.
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