{"id":7,"date":"2010-01-27T09:22:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T09:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/teen-drinkers-risk-permanent-brain-damage.html"},"modified":"2010-01-27T09:22:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T09:22:00","slug":"teen-drinkers-risk-permanent-brain-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/teen-drinkers-risk-permanent-brain-damage.html","title":{"rendered":"Teen Drinkers Risk Permanent Brain Damage"},"content":{"rendered":"I always chuckle, then sigh, when some reporter or researcher thinks they have discovered a &#8220;new&#8221; hazard to brain health.  I heard last year that Traumatic Brain Injury was a new injury, stemming from Iraq.  Not.  Now the latest in this long line of &#8220;discoveries&#8221; is that drinking can cause brain damage.  How do you say: Duh?<br \/><br \/>Still, it is good to remind teens and parents of what a recent study by the University of California, San Diego, found, NPR reported Monday.<br \/><br \/>In its online story,  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=122765890&amp;ps=cprs\">http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=122765890&ps;=cprs<\/a>, NPR reports that the school compared brain scans of teens who drank heavily to those that don\u2019t.<br \/><br \/>The youths who drank had damaged nerve tissue, so-called \u201cwhite matter\u201d in their brains. That kind of damage can lead to shortening a boy\u2019s attention span and negatively impact a girl\u2019s comprehension and interpretation of visual information, NPR said.<br \/><br \/><i>(What are they serious?  Like it wouldn&#8217;t affect a girl&#8217;s attention span to damage the electrical connections within the brain, or negatively impact a boy&#8217;s comprehensions? )<\/i><br \/><br \/>During teen years, certain areas of the brain are still forming and are more vulnerable to drugs and alcohol, which is why youths risk more than a hangover by drinking.<br \/><br \/>The study found that binge drinkers \u2013 having four or five drinks at a time, two or three times a month, performed worse on memory and cognitive tests than those who didn\u2019t.  <i>Academics and alcohol apparently don&#8217;t mix.  If they think that is &#8220;binge drinking&#8221;, they have obviously not been outside of their laboratories for a long time.  <\/i><b>What is perhaps most significant about this study is how little alcohol it took to show a material change in the adolescent brain.<\/b><br \/><br \/>Seriously, alcohol can cause brain damage and the younger the person, the more vulnerable the brain to the effects.  But alcohol is far more serious in other ways, such as a cause of serious car wrecks, of addiction, of alcohol poisoning, where true binge drinking &#8211; the kind where a person&#8217;s blood alcohol reaches .3% or above &#8211; can kill.  That which can kill, will cause brain damage if it falls short of a fatal dose.<br \/><br \/>Remember the time when pregnant women still drank?","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I always chuckle, then sigh, when some reporter or researcher thinks they have discovered a &#8220;new&#8221; hazard to brain health. I heard last year that Traumatic Brain Injury was a new injury, stemming from Iraq. Not. Now the latest in this long line of &#8220;discoveries&#8221; is that drinking can cause brain damage. How do you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,16,22,21],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alcohol-brain-damage","tag-brain-injury","tag-brain-injury-and-alcohol","tag-white-matter-damage-in-teens-from-alcohol"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerebral-palsy-medicalmalpractice.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}