NIH-funded rodent study finds molecular link between adolescent alcohol use and adult anxiety

The new report is the latest installment of work led by NIAAA grantee Subhash C. Pandey, Ph.D., professor and director of the NIAAA-funded Alcohol Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Senior Research Career Scientist at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Pandey and his colleagues have previously reported that rats exposed to alcohol during adolescence show greater anxiety-like behavior as adults compared to non-alcohol exposed rats.  They have also shown that those effects were linked to two genes – brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf) and activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc) -- that nerve cells need to form new connections with each other.