If you regularly drink alcohol, at some point in your life you may have fainted or fainted from drinking too much. Although these blackouts are frequent enough and happen to about half of the people who drink regularly, little is known about why they occur and what consequences it has in the long term.
Now, a team of scientists from the Alcoholism Research Society has presented a paper that sheds some light on this “blackout” caused by alcohol. The researchers examined 26 studies of unconsciousness due to alcoholic beverages to highlight the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this event. Logically our own biology is also a determining part of the effect of alcohol on our body, which explains why there are people who are unable to remember the night before despite not having drunk more than the rest of the group.
Loss of consciousness occurs when an individual’s blood alcohol level becomes excessively high. The hippocampus is a region very sensitive to alcohol and, as we will remember, it is responsible for the formation of new memories. Therefore, with a high intake of alcohol, the capacity of the hippocampus is reduced. It is not that we have “forgotten” what has happened, but that directly those memories were never stored in our brain.
” Technically, a drunk individual may or may not lose consciousness for a short time, but the truth is that memories of events are not formed for long periods of time during drunkenness,” says Ausim Azizi, leader of the work.
Apart from this extreme, the study also exposes that during this loss of consciousness we can cause significant damage to our physical and mental health: on the one hand, we can fall and break a bone without being aware of it; on the other, these brain “blackouts” can also cause significant psychological damage, as they are linked to neurobiological abnormalities and long-term psychiatric symptoms.
The study has been published in the journal Alcoholism; Clinical & Experimental Research.
