Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition long-term or permanently. Female rats do better than male rats

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Alcohol is a poison! Prohibition or severe supply restrictions are not a solution! Abstinence, the earlier, the better!

"For the first time, researchers demonstrated in an animal how heavy alcohol use leads to long-term behavioral issues by damaging brain circuits critical for decision-making.

Rats exposed to high amounts of alcohol exhibited poor decision-making during a complex task even after a monthslong withdrawal period. Key areas of their brains had undergone dramatic functional changes compared to healthy rats. ...

Previous experiments in animals weren't comparable to humans with alcohol use disorder because the animals didn't demonstrate deficits in rapid decision-making. The team believes this was because tasks in earlier experiments were too easy. ...

The team linked the behavioral difficulties to dramatic functional transformations in the dorsomedial striatum, a part of the brain critical for decision-making. The alcohol had damaged neural circuits causing alcohol-exposed rats to process information less effectively. ..."

From the abstract:

"Value-based decision-making relies on the striatum, where neural plasticity can be altered by chronic ethanol (EtOH) exposure, but the effects of such plasticity on striatal neural dynamics during decision-making remain unclear.

This study investigated the long-term impacts of EtOH on reward-driven decision-making and striatal neurocomputations in male and female rats using a dynamic probabilistic reversal learning task.

Following a prolonged withdrawal period, EtOH-exposed male rats exhibited deficits in adaptability and exploratory behavior, with aberrant outcome-driven value updating that heightened preference for chosen action. These behavioral changes were linked to altered neural activity in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), where EtOH increased outcome-related encoding and decreased choice-related encoding.

In contrast, female rats showed minimal behavioral changes with distinct EtOH-evoked alterations of neural activity, revealing significant sex differences in the impact of chronic EtOH.

Our findings underscore the impact of chronic EtOH exposure on adaptive decision-making, revealing enduring changes in neurocomputational processes in the striatum underlying cognitive deficits that differ by sex."

Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition | Hub "Months after withdrawal, brain activity during decision-making remained impaired in rats"

Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum (open access)

Fig. 1. EtOH-exposed rats exhibit a distinct behavioral pattern in the dynaPRL task.