We all know that binge drinking is bad for us, but do we know what it really does to our brains? Research by scientists at the University of Texas at Galveston (USA) suggests that long-term heavy drinking kills brain stem cells, which play a key role in proper cognitive function.
The experts investigated the impact of alcohol on neural stem cells , which are undifferentiated cells in the central nervous system that have the ability to specialize when necessary, can self-regenerate and create differentiated progenitor cells.
During experiments with mice, they found that alcohol disrupted neural stem cell differentiation and affected cell survival. They also noticed a different impact on women compared to men.
“The discovery that the adult brain produces stem cells that create new nerve cells offers a new way to address the problem of alcohol-related changes in the brain. However, before new approaches can be developed, we must understand how alcohol affects brain stem cells at different stages of growth, in different brain regions and in the brains of men and women, “explains Ping Wu, leader of the study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
Alcohol attacks stem cells
To study neural stem cell fate in laboratory mice exposed to long-term alcohol consumption, the team used the latest inducible cell fate mapping genetic techniques . These provide a means of observing what happens to these cells over time, including how the cells migrate and how they specialize.
They found that, of the subventricular zone and the subgranular zone of the brain – which are believed to contain neural stem cells – the area under the lateral ventricles of the central nervous system was the most affected by chronic alcohol exposure.
In this region, stem cells “were more susceptible to the effects of ethanol,” which interrupted their differentiation process. However, the scientists observed that chronic alcohol use appeared to kill most neural stem cells , as after long-term alcohol exposure, the pool of stem cells had greatly decreased across the board.
Women, the most exposed
Additionally, the researchers found that female mice were more susceptible to the effects of excess alcohol than their male counterparts.
“Females on ethanol showed more severe symptoms of intoxication and increased in severity at a higher rate than males,” the authors reported.
Not only that, but the number of stem cells was also reduced more significantly in the brains of the females compared to those of the males.
“Probably the most interesting finding of this work is that regional location and gender played a fundamental role in determining the response of neural stem cells to ethanol consumption,” they comment.
In future studies, the researchers hope to reveal more information about the mechanism at play in the interaction between alcohol and these cells, which would allow discovering better strategies to address alcohol abuse.
Referencia: Spatial and Sex-Dependent Responses of Adult Endogenous Neural Stem Cells to Alcohol Consumption. Erica L. McGrath, Junling Gao, Yong-Fang Kuo et al. Stem Cell Reports (2017) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2017.10.007
