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Overview
Scientists have established that the “shrinkage” that alcohol can cause in some regions of the brain that results in cognitive damage will begin to reverse when alcohol stays out of the body for lengthening periods of time. To understand this important news for people recovering from alcoholism, it is key to understand how alcohol affects the brain.
Brain Damage
Doctors and researchers sometimes use the term alcohol-related cognitive impairment to refer to the damaging impact that repeated excessive alcohol consumption can have on the brain’s ability to function. Some of this impact stems directly from alcohol’s poisonous effects on the brain. Areas of the brain most likely to be damaged by alcoholism include the frontal lobe—responsible for higher-level mental skills as the ability to think logically and the ability to exert behavioral control—and the cerebellum, which gives the brain its ability to control and coordinate muscle movements.
MRI Testing
In the study published in 2015 in Addiction Biology, researchers from the San Francisco VA Medical Center and UC San Francisco used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to examine the brains of a group of people who were recovering from alcoholism and abstaining from alcohol. Each study participant underwent MRI testing after being alcohol-free—for one week, one month, and seven and a half months. The researchers conducted multiple scans to track the changing state of the brain over time. When the researchers studied the positive changes in gray matter volume, they concluded that most of these changes occurred in the three-week span between the end of the first week of abstinence and the end of the first month of abstinence. The positive changes in white matter volume occurred at a fairly consistent pace throughout the seven and a half months of abstinence.
Alcohol Abstinence
Earlier research conducted in 2004 on lab rats at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies was the first to show a burst of new brain cell development as a result of abstinence from chronic alcohol consumption. The Bowles research team examined the brain cell growth in adult rats that were given an amount of alcohol over a four-day period that produced alcohol dependence. The researchers found that alcohol dependency slowed neurogenesis or brain cell development.
New Brain Cells
It was long thought that the number of neurons in the adult brain was established early in life, but it is now known that the adult brain is capable of neurogenesis or the production of new neurons. Research looking at the emergence of new brain cells after abstinence from alcohol found that there were bursts of new cell development relatively soon after abstinence.
Brain Impairment
Since research has shown that the brain is impaired early on in recovery, the medical community has come to understand that it is important to not bombard people seeking alcohol recovery help with too much information early on. This can affect the effectiveness of alcoholism treatment programs in the first weeks of recovery and abstinence.
