Young people are more and more fans of heavily alcoholic parties, “Binge Drinking”, which lead to excessive drunkenness in a very short time. Beware of the consequences on health, and in particular on the brain.
Drink, a lot, very quickly to achieve express intoxication. Such is, unfortunately, the program of many teenagers or young adults for “Binge Drinking” evenings. Géraldine Zamansky, journalist at Health magazine on France 5, met researchers who study certain consequences of this massive alcoholization.
franceinfo: How did these researchers proceed?
Géraldine Zamansky : It is a European team which followed for several months 71 young Irish people, aged 18 to 24, to assess – beyond the immediate risks such as coma – the effects of this express intoxication. The definition of “Binge Drinking”, a phenomenon born among our Anglo-Saxon neighbors, is the fact of drinking at least 6 glasses of alcohol in a single evening. Carina Carbia Sinde, a neuropsychologist at the Catholic University of Louvain, told me how these 71 volunteers not only agreed to tell how often it happened to them, but also took several psychological tests, donated blood and stool: the latter contain a sample of the famous intestinal flora, also called microbiota, located in the last part of our digestive tract. Many discoveries have already shown important interactions of this intestinal flora with the brain, to the point that some speak of a second brain.
What are the effects of massive alcoholism on the balance of this second brain?
The more the volunteers are adept at express drunkenness, the more their microbiota is damaged. And what is particularly worrying is that certain identified imbalances have already been observed in people who are dependent on alcohol. Above all, Carina Carbia Sinde explains that in parallel with this attack, young people more often feel the urgent urge to drink. The tests also show that the functioning of the brain is modified, slower in certain tasks, for example.
Could these ultra-alcoholic evenings therefore constitute the first stage of a real addiction to alcohol?
Exactly, this risk is already known but not yet fully explained. This study specifies for the first time the damage to the microbiota, that is to say the bacteria whose quantity is reduced and those found in excess. Blood tests also reveal chronic inflammation that could affect the brain, which Carina Carbia Sinde recalls is still developing and therefore fragile until the age of 25. His hope would be a treatment with the missing bacteria, to restore the intestinal flora. But in the meantime, prevention remains the top priority. One in three young people would be affected, often from high school. We must dare to talk about it to help everyone control their alcohol consumption, by fighting against the behavior of dangerous groups that incite excess.
The Irish Youth Study:
Prevention: