How many drinks is too many?

A new rodent study shows that even small quantities of alcohol can trigger epigenomic and transciptomic changes in brain circuitry in an area that is crucial in the development of addiction. 

What’s more, the University of Illinois Chicago researchers who conducted the study say that the pathways involved in priming the brain for addiction are the same ones that are associated with the highs of drinking, like euphoria and anxiolysis, the clinical term for a level of sedation in which a person is relaxed but awake. 

“This suggests that when the brain experiences the anti-anxiety effects of alcohol and the mood lift — the relaxation and the buzz — it is also being primed for alcohol use disorder,” said the study’s senior author Subhash Pandey, the Joseph A. Flaherty endowed professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics in the UIC College of Medicine.