Alcohol consumption in early adulthood linked to middle age cognitive decline

It's well known that alcohol consumption is an age-old method for coping with stress. But surprising? research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that, when such self-medication begins in early adulthood, negative cognitive effects start to show up in middle-age-even after long periods of total abstinence.

These effects include a decreased ability to cope with changing situations, an increased likelihood to drink when stressed and the kinds of cognitive decline associated with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The new research, published recently in the journal Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research, helps us understand how alcohol rewires the brain's circuitry and can help suggest new approaches for helping people adapt to the long-term effects of alcohol use.

Researchers have long known that stress and alcohol have a mutually reinforcing relationship: alcohol can help take the edge off stressful situations, but in so doing it can decrease the brain's ability to manage stress on its own, meaning one has to keep drinking, and drinking more, in order to relieve stress from a bad day. At the same time, the more one drinks the more stress can accrue from increasingly poor decision making. It can be a vicious cycle that gets harder to break the more the brain's circuitry changes. But what about the long-term effects of stress and alcohol?

My lab studies the neurocircuitry that underlies how we make decisions. We all know that drinking can often lead to poor decision-making, but we wondered how early adulthood drinking combined with stress affects that circuitry, especially as we grow older. If we can figure out how alcohol and stress change the brain's circuitry, then we can help figure out how best to help people."