14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have recently determined that genetics may play a role in the way people respond to alcohol. Their study was mostly focused on individuals who display low responses to the chemical.
In the research, the team noticed that people with a low response to alcohol tended to display different patterns of neural activation from their peers. The team was able to monitor test participants using a medical technique called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).
According to the researchers, these different neural activation patterns may be responsible for making some people unable to recognize modest levels of alcohol intoxication. These conclusions could be used to develop markers for identifying people who are at risk of developing alcohol-use disorders.
The new investigation was conducted on people between the ages of 18 and 25. All test participants were from San Diego, and all of them were hooked to fMRI machines in order to gage their low or high responses (LR) to alcohol exposure, PsychCentral reports.
“We found significant differences in brain activation between individuals with high and low levels of response to alcohol while performing a cognitive task, possibly reflecting difference in the amount of brain activity used to deal with a cognitive challenge,” Dr. Marc A. Schuckit explains.
The researcher holds an appointment as a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at UCSD. He was also the leader of the new study, which will appear in the January 2012 issue of the esteemed medical journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
“While some genes that contribute to LR have been provisionally identified, the mechanism through which the low LR operates in the brain has not been extensively studied,” the team leader explains.
“This report confirms prior reports from our group that used a different cognitive task to show that people with a low LR process information differently from those with a high LR even when tested with placebo,” the UCSD professor adds.
The team determined that investigating the effects of low LR to alcohol might be of use to researchers who want to establish how people feel when they are only slightly-to-moderately intoxicated. Knowing how individuals feel in this situation might explain the spread of alcoholism through the general population,.
“The real issue for clinicians is that the low LR is an important, genetically influenced risk factor for later alcohol problems. These results can also inform researchers interested in how the low LR might actually work to affect how intoxicated a person might feel,” Schuckit concludes.