Alcohol only takes 6 minutes to destroy the brain

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated the extremely rapid changes that alcohol causes in neurons.

Previously, tests of alcohol effects on the brain were only performed on animals. So scientists from the hospital under Heidelberg University (Germany) want to find out how many minutes alcohol needs to work on the human brain. They recruited 15 volunteers (8 men and 7 women) to participate in the experiment. Experts ask these people to drink some alcohol or beer before putting them in a high-speed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) camera.

When volunteers' blood alcohol content reached 0.05-0.06%, the team asked them to stop drinking. At that concentration, the drinker will have difficulty driving, but has not fallen into a drunken state. Brain imaging allows experts to track the smallest changes in brain cells.

Dr. Armin Biller, a neurologist at Heidelberg Hospital, said that alcohol on the brain after 6 minutes since it entered the body. Chemicals with brain protection function decrease as blood alcohol concentration increases. The chemicals in nerve cells have also decreased since alcohol entered the body.

However, what surprised the research team was: The male brain and female brain responded equally to alcohol. The harmful effects of alcohol on the brain only take a moment, but nerve cells need a lot of time to recover.

'We followed the volunteers' brain activity until the next day and found that the normal metabolism in the brain was completely reversed after the blood alcohol concentration reached 0.06% or higher. ' Biller explained.

Biller said that the resilience of neurons decreased, even paralyzed, if the amount of alcohol in the body continued to increase.

'These acute effects can be the basis for permanent damage in the brains of alcoholics , ' Biller said.