News — Alcohol use leads to earlier brain aging and impaired behavioral flexibility, with those effects detectable even among adults in their 20s and 30s, according to an innovative study. Hazardous drinking is known to be linked to cognitive-behavioral impairments, including difficulty adapting to changing circumstances. This helps explain, for example, why people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) continue to drink despite negative consequences. Evidence is growing that heavy alcohol use accelerates brain aging. It is not known, however, whether this aging effect explains the link between alcohol use and certain cognitive deficits typical of older brains. For the study in Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research, investigators explored whether hazardous drinking predicted brain aging as measured by a machine learning tool and whether brain aging explained the association between alcohol use and behavioral inflexibility.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worked with 58 people aged 22-40 (35 were women), many of whom had started drinking in adolescence. The participants filled out questionnaires on their alcohol use. They also underwent task training that required them to adjust their responses as the task evolved. All participants had an MRI scan, and a machine-learning program was used to evaluate 3D structural brain images to estimate their brain age. Researchers calculated the difference between estimated brain age and actual chronological age (“brain-PAD”). They used statistical analysis to explore the associations between alcohol use, brain-PAD, and perseverative errors on the task test and to assess the role of brain aging on behavioral inflexibility linked to drinking.
The participants mostly reported light to moderate alcohol use and minimal use of other substances. Their brain aging results ranged from somewhat delayed to substantially accelerated, with some acceleration on average. Higher alcohol use scores predicted more accelerated brain aging. While the alcohol use scores did not directly affect perseverative errors on the behavioral inflexibility test, increases in accelerated brain aging scores did.
The findings showed that increasingly hazardous drinking strongly predicted more accelerated brain aging and implied that this mechanism accounted for at least part of the reduction in behavioral flexibility. This is the first study to show machine learning-predicted measures of brain aging linked to a task-based measure of behavioral inflexibility, with evidence that brain aging may be a causal mechanism between alcohol use and those cognitive deficits. The results suggest that even a small amount of alcohol may age the brain, with effects detectable in early-to-middle adulthood, earlier than had been presumed. Further research is needed using larger samples and to explore the effects of early drinking, education, and other factors that influence cognitive decline.
Greater alcohol intake predicts accelerated brain aging in humans, which mediates the relationship between alcohol intake and behavioral flexibility. J. Battista, E. Vidrascu, M. Robertson, D. Robinson, C. Boettiger.
ACER-24-6248.R1
RSS