Recent Research Uncovering the Effects of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) on the Brain. People with alcohol use disorder (AUD) develop an ongoing problem caused by changes in the brain and how they act. Having AUD can mess up communication pathways in the brain, which makes someone want to drink more and makes the issue worse.
Researchers at Scripps Research have just discovered something pretty amazing. They found that in the brains of mice with alcohol dependency, certain molecules called interleukin 1β (IL-1β) become more active than normal. This activates an inflammatory response in areas in the brain which are responsible for making decisions. In other words, there’s a connection between our immune system and alcohol use disorder!
Marisa Roberto, a professor of neuroscience from Scripps Research, said that changes in our brain can cause bad decisions and impulsive behaviour when we have an alcohol use disorder. She also added that there might be a way to cure this disorder by taking medicines which target the IL-1β pathway. It’s incredibly exciting!
Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is when a person drinks alcohol in an uncontrolled way, like too much and too often. Scientists have noticed connections between AUD and the immune system, especially with something called IL-1β. If someone has changes to the gene that makes IL-1β, they are more likely to develop AUD. Autopsies of people with AUD have also found higher levels of IL-1β in their brains.
We thought that the IL-1β cytokine had something to do with AUD, but we were not aware of how it affected the brain. Florence Varodayan Ph.D., an assistant professor at Binghamton University and a former researcher in Roberto Lab, studied this further.
Recently, Roberto and Varodayan conducted a study to compare the effects of different levels of alcohol consumption. They found that mice who drank a lot of alcohol had around double the amount of IL-1β in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The mPFC is an area of the brain that helps control emotion and behavior.
The team then discovered that the IL-1β response system in mice that had been exposed to alcohol was different than those who hadn’t or those who had just drank moderate amounts. In non-alcohol and moderate drinking mice, IL-1β triggered an anti-inflammatory sequence of events which reduced GABA in their brain. GABA is a special substance carried by nerves to regulate their activities.
When scientists tested alcohol-dependent mice, they found that a specific protein (called IL-1β) was causing the mice’s brains to do things differently than normal. It even worked when the mouse was trying to quit drinking. This protein triggered something called pro-inflammatory signaling and made another substance, GABA, become more active – both of these changes were linked to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD).
The U.S Food and Drug Administration already approves certain drugs that can stop the action of a chemical called IL-1β, to treat diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and other kinds of inflammation. To see if these drugs could be useful in treating alcoholism, more research needs to be conducted.
Roberto says they plan on continuing this study with more efforts to understand how preventing some parts of the IL-1β pathway might help manage alcohol use disorder.
A group of scientists studied how alcoholism affects the brain in mice, and their findings were published in a magazine called Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. The researchers found that drinking alcohol causes inflammation of some parts of the brain, which can affect how it works. They also saw changes in signals sent between certain parts of the brain that are involved with thinking and decision-making. These findings could help us understand what happens when people drink too much alcohol.
The National Institutes of Health, The Schimmel Family Chair, The Pearson Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research, and The Scripps Research Institute’s Animal Models Core Facility provided money to do a study.
