14 DAY TRIAL // Boys think of all kinds of strategies on how to get girls drunk and then get them into bed.
But, in fact, alcohol affects the women's brain more severely than that. It affects their cognitive abilities more than it manages to do in the case of men, and even when women consume less alcohol than men over long periods of time. Alcohol harms consumers' "visual working memory, spatial planning, problem solving and cognitive flexibility," said co-author Barbara Flannery, a senior scientist at the research institute RTI International in Baltimore.
"But it's not only drinkers' professional lives that may flounder as a result of reduced cognition. Alcoholics may have difficulty behaving appropriately in social situations. Cognitive flexibility enables you to know how to communicate differently in a business environment than you would with your friends," she added.
The research was made on a pool of male and female alcoholic (78 and 24) and non-alcoholic (68) subjects chosen at the Leningrad Regional Center of Addictions, Russia. All subjects were younger than 40 to "avoid age effects of cognitive parameters" explained Flannery.
The experiments showed that non-alcoholics bypassed significantly the alcoholics, who had not drunk for three weeks, on cognitive tests.
The exercises assessed the capacity to shape matching patterns, remember the locations of stimuli, and name colors when faced with contradictory information.
But the female alcoholics cored much worse even than the alcoholic men, pointing out a "gender-sensitive public awareness campaign that highlights these cognitive deficits", said Flannery.
The alcoholic women subjects were on the booze on average for 10.6 years, compared to 14.8 years for their male counterparts.
Other approaches also found that female alcoholics scored worse than alcoholic men in experiments measuring working memory, visual and spatial skills and psychomotor speed.
Other studies revealed that females are more vulnerable than men to alcohol related illnesses in the liver, heart and muscles. "The non-alcoholics were more educated, a factor that might have marginally affected the results. It's not known to what degree and at what period of sobriety alcoholics can recover cognitive impairments," added Flannery.
Studies on juvenile rats showed that the brain of the alcohol induced more severe memory loss in teen than adult brains, a discovery that suggests that the teen girls could be the most vulnerable category to cognitive impairments. "The higher percentage of body fat in females means alcohol is twice as toxic," said Dr. Matthew Torrington, a substance abuse specialist at UCLA and medical director of an addiction-treatment center in Santa Monica, California.