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Is the U.S. Drunk-Driving Limit Too High? - The New York Times
Looking at how these impairments affect people’s driving in the real world, one study reported that people with a B.A.C. of .05 had a 38 percent higher risk of getting into a car crash than those with no alcohol in their system; at .08, the risk rose to 169 percent. And an analysis Mr. Fell conducted in 2017 estimated that lowering the legal limit nationally to .05 could reduce alcohol-related fatal crashes by 11 percent, saving nearly 1,800 lives per year.
Roughly speaking, a B.A.C. of .05 results from consuming two drinks in two hours for a 150-pound female, and three drinks in two hours for a 200-pound male. Body weight, how much time has passed since your first drink and whether you have food in your stomach all influence your B.A.C. And remember: “A drink” means one 12-ounce beer with 5 percent alcohol, one 5-ounce glass of wine or one 1.5-ounce shot of spirits. Stronger beers, generous pours of wine and mixed drinks with several shots will all push your B.A.C. higher.
How Does Alcohol Affect Your Gut Health? - The New York Times
Researchers have looked at the microbiomes of people who have been treated for alcohol use disorder and found that within two to three weeks after the people stopped drinking, their gut microbes started to show signs of recovering, Dr. Barb said, and their gut linings became less “leaky.” But, she added, people who get treated for alcohol use disorder also usually start to eat more healthfully and sleep better, which can improve gut health, too.
How Does Alcohol Affect Your Gut Health? - The New York Times
In a 2023 study, for example, researchers looked at the microbiomes of 71 people ages 18 to 25 who did not have alcohol use disorder. Those who reported more frequent binge drinking (defined as four or more drinks within about two hours for women, or five or more drinks for men) had microbiome changes that correlated with greater alcohol cravings. That study also added to previous research that found that binge drinking was associated with greater blood markers of inflammation.
Cheers to Longevity: Couples Who Drink Together, Live Longer - Neuroscience News
Shared Drinking Habits Linked to Longevity: Couples who both drink alcohol tend to live longer compared to those with discordant drinking habits or who abstain altogether.
Impact on Relationship Quality: Concordant drinking couples report higher relationship satisfaction, potentially due to increased intimacy and shared activities.
Remote Work Comes With Daytime Drug and Drinking Habits - Bloomberg
But hybrid work, Angres says, telescopes five-to-10 year downward spirals down to months, partially by removing an important social impediment to substance or other addictive tendencies: ample time around healthy people.
Binge drinking raises risk of developing alcohol problems, even for moderate drinkers -- ScienceDaily
After analyzing a national sample of US adults, UT Austin psychology professor Charles Holahan, PhD, and his collaborators found that moderate average drinkers with a pattern of binge drinking were almost five times more likely to experience multiple alcohol problems and were twice as likely to experience more alcohol problems nine years later. Moderate drinking is defined as having on average no more than one drink a day for women and two for men. Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks on the same occasion.
"What this means," said Dr. Holahan, "is that an individual whose total consumption is seven drinks on Saturday night presents a greater risk profile than someone whose total consumption is a daily drink with dinner, even though their average drinking level is the same."
More alcohol, less brain: Association begins with an average of just one drink a day -- ScienceDaily
But according to a new study, alcohol consumption even at levels most would consider modest -- a few beers or glasses of wine a week -- may also carry risks to the brain. An analysis of data from more than 36,000 adults, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption was associated with reductions in overall brain volume.
The link grew stronger the greater the level of alcohol consumption, the researchers showed. As an example, in 50-year-olds, as average drinking among individuals increases from one alcohol unit (about half a beer) a day to two units (a pint of beer or a glass of wine) there are associated changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Going from two to three alcohol units at the same age was like aging three and a half years. The team reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Drinking Too Much Is an American Problem - The Atlantic
Over time, groups that drank together would have cohered and flourished, dominating smaller groups—much like the ones that prayed together. Moments of slightly buzzed creativity and subsequent innovation might have given them further advantage still. In the end, the theory goes, the drunk tribes beat the sober ones.
Drinking Too Much Is an American Problem - The Atlantic
Even drinking in bars has become less social in recent years, or at least this was a common perception among about three dozen bartenders I surveyed while reporting this article. “I have a few regulars who play games on their phone,” one in San Francisco said, “and I have a standing order to just refill their beer when it’s empty. No eye contact or talking until they are ready to leave.” Striking up conversations with strangers has become almost taboo, many bartenders observed, especially among younger patrons. So why not just drink at home? Spending money to sit in a bar alone and not talk to anyone was, a bartender in Columbus, Ohio, said, an interesting case of “trying to avoid loneliness without actual togetherness.”
Anthony Hopkins Remembers It All | The New Yorker
At eighty-three, the actor says, performing is easier than it’s ever been. Every role slips into the story of life.
Neuroscience research identifies a new target for the treatment of alcohol-withdrawal induced depression
The researchers randomly assigned mice to alcohol drinking or non-alcohol drinking groups. After 6 weeks, all mice then underwent forced abstinence where they had access to water only. The mice were then tested for anxiety and depression like behaviors using the elevated plus maze, open field test, sucrose preference test and the forced swim test. The brains were then analyzed using fluorescence immunochistochemistry and electrophysiology.
The results showed that withdrawal from alcohol resulted in emotional disturbances that mimic some of the symptoms of depression seen in people, including a lack of interest in rewarding things, as well as a heightened response to stressful events.
When studying the brains of the mice, the researchers found that alcohol withdrawal produced divergent effects on the physiology of somatostatin neurons in the prefrontal cortex and ventral bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Both brain regions are well known for their role in emotional processing and addiction.
Dao states that “the effects of alcohol withdrawal appeared more pronounced in females, underscoring the complex relationship between addiction and emotional disorders seen in men and women.”
Scott Crawford's Journey to Sobriety Guides His Vision for a Healthier Industry - INDY Week
Steve and Mickey Bakst founded Ben’s Friends, an industry support group for those struggling with addiction. I started a chapter in Raleigh, which quickly grew. A year later, I was hosting Ben’s Friends meetings at Crawford and Son, where we’d share our stories, tackling topics like how to handle wine tastings or how to maintain a group of friends, sober. We started to create that blueprint of success that had never existed.
One day, it occurred to me that here I was talking with people about how to navigate the industry sober, and yet, I was still rewarding a good shift from my own staff with alcohol. When I started Crawford and Son, I didn’t want to seem anti-alcohol. I was scared to be “that guy” who just eliminated alcohol altogether. If you’re the sober guy in the room, people already start to feel uncomfortable around you. So, I tried to take an approach that would create a healthy culture around alcohol by keeping a close eye on it. We allowed a beer at the end of the night or a glass of wine while cleaning up. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.
Juggling My Children, Their Alcoholic Sitter and My Own Sobriety - The New York Times
Vodka. I’d like seven vodka tonics. I’d like to slip inside a bottle of vodka, to bathe in it, to slosh, just for the night, just for a little while.
That’s how I know my addiction is still there, still lurking, still hungry. After 18 years it’s probably ravenous, but it’s not starving. Starvation is something you die of, and addiction cannot be killed. You can’t excise or eradicate it. You have to contain it. Dam it. Barricade it. Even then, it whispers. Through whatever levees you erect, it gurgles. It splashes out a Morse code of desire. You become a certain kind of deaf, a certain level of numb, all the time, every day. That’s the work. That is how you progress from drunk, to dry drunk, to sober human. You’ll never be just human. You’ll always be a sober human — a person almost, but not quite.
Increase in pleasurable effects of alcohol over time can predict alcohol use disorder: New research challenges existing dogma that higher tolerance for stimulating and rewarding effects of alcohol leads to addiction -- ScienceDaily
"These pleasurable alcohol effects grow in intensity over time, and do not dissipate, in people progressing in excessive drinking," said King. "This tells us that having a higher sensitivity to the rewarding effects of alcohol in the brain puts such individuals at higher risk for developing addiction. It all fits a picture of persistent pleasure-seeking that increases the likelihood of habitual excessive drinking over time. Alcoholics were thought to need to drink more to finally get their desired effect when they drink, but these well-controlled data do not support that contention. They get the desirable alcohol effect early in the drinking bout and that seems to fuel wanting more alcohol."
While it may seem relatively intuitive that individuals who experience alcohol's pleasurable effects most intensely are at the greatest risk for developing drinking problems, King's findings run counter to current prominent addiction theories.
"Our results support a theory called incentive-sensitization," said King. "In response to a standard intoxicating dose of alcohol in the laboratory, ratings of wanting more alcohol increased substantially over the decade among the individuals who developed more severe AUD. Additionally, the hedonic response -- essentially, how much a person liked the effects -- remained elevated over this interval and didn't go down at all. This has traditionally been the crux of the lore of addiction -- that addicts don't like the drug (alcohol) but can't stop using it."
Drug eases recovery for those with severe alcohol withdrawal -- ScienceDaily
According to the researchers, subjects with more severe symptoms -- including shakes, heightened cravings and anxiety, and difficulty sleeping -- who received prazosin significantly reduced the number of heavy drinking episodes and days they drank compared to those who received a placebo. The drug had little effect on those with few or no withdrawal symptoms.
"There has been no treatment readily available for people who experience severe withdrawal symptoms and these are the people at highest risk of relapse and are most likely to end up in hospital emergency rooms," said corresponding author Rajita Sinha, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, a professor of neuroscience, and director of the Yale Stress Center.
Chronic alcohol use reshapes the brain's immune landscape, driving anxiety and addiction -- ScienceDaily
In mice with chronic alcohol use, IL-10 was significantly reduced in the amygdala and didn't signal properly to neurons, contributing to increased alcohol intake. By boosting IL-10 signaling in the brain, however, the scientists could reverse the aberrant effects. Notably, they observed a stark reduction in anxiety-like behaviors and motivation to drink alcohol.
"We've shown that inflammatory immune responses in the brain are very much at play in the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorder," Roberto says. "But perhaps more importantly, we provided a new framework for therapeutic intervention, pointing to anti-inflammatory mechanisms."
Smartphones can tell when you're drunk by analyzing your walk -- ScienceDaily
"In 5 years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels," Suffoletto says, "they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sexual encounters."
A pill to fight alcoholism causes an uproar in France
Among the issues they cited was the ANSM decision to approve baclofen before the second study was publicly available. Even before publication, the academics noted the trial sponsor — the Public Assistance Hospital in Paris — touted results in a press release. The hospital also sold study data to Ethypharm, a small company that sought regulatory approval to market the drug, although this was not disclosed in the paper. Curiously, Ethypharm also performed the analysis that was the basis for the ANSM decision.
When the Bacloville study was finally published last December, the group of researchers discovered an unexplained change in the primary outcome, a practice that is frowned upon because it can suggest an attempt to achieve desired results. The researchers contend the change in outcomes made it harder to analyze what, if any, difference baclofen had on patients, leading to a bias in favor of the drug.
“Biased trials lead to biased decisions, and biased decisions mean that people get treatment that doesn’t work, possibly don’t get treatment that does work, can be harmed by treatment and it costs the health care system more,” said Joel Lexchin, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto, and one of the researchers who have criticized the Bacloville study.
An Alcoholic Parent Can Affect How a Child's Brain Switches Tasks - Scientific American
The scans showed that individuals without FHA went through a transient period between the game task and the resting state in which some brain regions—frontal, parietal and visual areas, in particular—reconfigured the way in which they communicated with one another. People with FHA experienced fewer changes—even after the researchers controlled for factors such as age, gender, motion in the fMRI scanner, drinking and depression. “It looks like FHA impacts the mental preparation to switch from performing one task to another,” Amico says. “This could be analogous to the process of clearing the cache of your smartphone when you want it to switch faster between apps. The problem is that this ‘cache-clearing process’ might be impaired in brains with family history of alcoholism.”
What Does It Mean to Have a Serious Drinking Problem? - The New York Times
I didn’t join A.A., though I don’t rule it out. I sought support from my husband, daughter and friends — those I’d offended, those surprised I even had a problem. I devoured others’ stories, watching movies about alcoholics, reading memoirs, lurking in sub-Reddits for people struggling to quit. But what really kept me on the path was the remarkable difference between the drinking and not drinking me. I hadn’t grasped the degree to which a sense of shame had insidiously undergirded my life. Now it was gone, replaced by an unaccustomed pride.
The longer I abstained, the better I felt, in ways that spilled into marriage, work, parenting, friendships. Recently, someone unaware I’d quit told me I looked years younger. I’m more patient. My headaches are infrequent, my energy up.
Those results fit with a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, among the first focused on moderate drinkers’ mental health. Researchers studying cohorts of people in Hong Kong and the United States found even “safe” drinkers, women in particular, showed improved well-being if they stopped.
Today, I can label myself. I had moderate alcohol use disorder, a “chronic relapsing brain disease” marked by loss of control over alcohol. The National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse says 6.2 percent of American adults, more than 15 million people, are on the alcohol use disorder spectrum. (Other research puts the numbers higher.) I’d guess many, like me, drink modestly enough that they don’t believe they have a problem. I feel lucky I quit before anything worse happened.
In mice, alcohol dependence results in brain-wide remodeling of functional architecture -- ScienceDaily
"The neuroscience of addiction has made tremendous progress, but the focus has always been on a limited number of brain circuits and neurotransmitters, primarily dopaminergic neurons, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex," said senior author Olivier George, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
"Research groups have been fighting for years about whether 'their' brain circuit is the key to addiction. Our results confirm these regions are important, but the fact that we see such a massive remodeling of the functional brain architecture was a real shock. It's like studying the solar system and then discovering that there is an entire universe behind it. It shows that if you really want to understand the neurobiological mechanisms leading to addiction, you can't just look at a handful of brain regions, you need to look at the entire brain, you need to take a step back and consider the whole organ."
George said the findings further undermine the idea that addiction is simply a psychological condition or consequence of lifestyle. "You would be surprised at how prevalent this view remains," he said. "The brain-wide remodeling of the functional architecture observed here is not 'normal.' It is not observed in a naïve animal. It is not observed in an animal that drinks recreationally. It is only observed in animals with a history of alcohol dependence and it is massive. Such a decrease in brain modularity has been observed in numerous brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury and seizure disorders."
Brain modularity is the theory that there are functionally specialized regions in the brain responsible for different, specific cognitive processes. For example, the frontal lobes of the human brain are involved in executive functions, such as reasoning and planning, while the fusiform face area located in the lower rear of the brain is involved in recognizing faces.
Reduced modularity, said George, likely interferes with "normal neuronal activity and information processing and contributes to cognitive impairment, emotional distress and intense craving observed in mice during abstinence from alcohol."
Due to the format of the testing, George said it was not clear if the reduced modularity was permanent. "So far, we only know that it lasts at least one week into abstinence. We have not tested longer durations of abstinence, but it's one of our goals."
The Art of Dying | The New Yorker
I was climbing stairs and paused, too exhausted for another step. I harbored a nebulous conviction that I could tolerate only so much pain, short of a red zone in which I would go mad or die or something terrible would happen. And that anyone should see as much and want me to do anything—have a drink or a drug, for starters—to make it stop.
I thought, They say one day at a time. How about one second? I stared at my ticking watch. A black abyss opened. I was numbly aware that I wasn’t insane. I wasn’t dying. Reality was droning on as usual, with impartial sunlight streaming through a nearby window and picking out swirls of dust motes.
A perfectly demented thought blazed up. Roughly: What if they find out I’m not really an alcoholic and throw me out of here? I need this place! I believe it was the last, deepest rootlet of my denial, expelled. Not an alcoholic?
The Art of Dying | The New Yorker
See, Brooke is a child of alcoholics, as I’m not. I grew up and became one. She grew up and married one. She knew I was a mess but thought the drinking part was normal, until she got wise and kicked me out of the house. (Note to anyone who knows an active alcoholic: never, ever sympathize. If you suspect you’re going to, shut your eyes, plug your ears, and hum.)
What Chris said
I figuratively put all the chemicals in a funnel, and they came out bourbon. Jack Daniel’s-on-the-rocks, with a splash, except when scarce funds reduced me to Heaven Hill. Alcohol was liberating for me at first. A standard progression: great, good, fair, poor, bad, very bad, and then a phase for which any word but “Hell” fails. Halfway through the second drink, there may be a flicker of the old euphoria, quickly snuffed. You chase it in vain for the rest of a wretched night. It’s over for you. A line has been crossed. Yet you cannot imagine yourself not drinking. The obsession is at one with your core sense of self.
Consuming alcohol leads to epigenetic changes in brain memory centers -- ScienceDaily
n, in mouse models, how acetate -- a byproduct of the alcohol breakdown produced mostly in the liver -- travels to the brain's learning system and directly alters proteins that regulate DNA function. This impacts how some genes are expressed and ultimately affects how mice behave when given environmental cues to consume alcohol. Their findings were published today in Nature.
"It was a huge surprise to us that metabolized alcohol is directly used by the body to add chemicals called acetyl groups to the proteins that package DNA, called histones," said the study's senior author Shelley Berger, PhD, the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments Cell and Developmental Biology and Biology, and director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. "To our knowledge, this data provides the first empirical evidence indicating that a portion of acetate derived from alcohol metabolism directly influences epigenetic regulation in the brain."
Light drinking may be beneficial in type 2 diabetes: Further research needed -- ScienceDaily
The authors found ten relevant RCTs involving 575 participants that were included in this review. Meta-analysis showed that alcohol consumption was associated with reduced triglyceride levels and insulin levels, but had no statistically significant effect on fasting blood glucose levels, glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c, a measure of blood glucose control), or total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (bad) cholesterol, and high density lipoprotein (good) cholesterol.
Subgroup analysis indicated that drinking light to moderate amounts of alcohol decreased the levels of triglycerides (blood fats) and insulin in people with T2DM. Light to moderate drinking was defined by the authors as 20g or less of alcohol per day. This translates to approximately 1.5 cans of beer (330ml, 5% alcohol), a large (200ml) glass of wine (12% alcohol) or a 50ml serving of 40% alcohol spirit (for example vodka/gin).
