A Landmark Rat Study on the Origins of Alcoholism | Hacker News Reader

A Landmark Rat Study on the Origins of Alcoholism

theatlantic.com

47 pointssohkamyung19 comments

There have been times in my life when I felt I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. For me, it's the hazard of "n beers feels great, so n+1 must feel better", culminating in a worse hangover than necessary.

But when I read about the experience of what I might think of as true alcoholics, it puts in perspective how powerful that disease is. It's incomprehensible to me to drink straight through immediately apparent negative consequences.

The n+1 problem stems from the issue that the euphoria from alcohol is strongest while bac is rising. When it’s static, there isn’t much euphoric effect.

The euphoria is mitigated by actual drunkenness, so the best euphoria is while absorbing the first beer, less with each one. But once the absorption of a beer is complete, you just have the remainder effects of alcohol without the euphoria.

Do you know where I can read more? How does the rate of rise play in to the euphoria?

(A very odd couple of weekends figuring out an optimal dosing schedule awaits...)

Interestingly you can get drunk on alcohol free beer. The human mind is amazing.

I consider myself very lucky that I'm not an alcoholic. I used to drink quite a lot. Every day at one point. That is enough for some people to become alcoholic.

Consider that if I was using cocaine I would be expected to have been fully aware that what I was doing was harmful. But drinking every day is considered completely normal and nobody would question your usage.

While I know that some people do drink everyday and consider it normal, I don't and none of my friends do. We're all occasional drinkers and might drink on one or two nights, and often not at all for several weeks. I'd consider drinking every day to be excessive, and I personally wouldn't be able to cope with it; it would make me feel terrible because I don't have the tolerance for that quantity of alcohol.

If you look at the recommended weekly units for males and females, daily drinking will be at or comfortably exceed the limit by quite a margin. That's definitely going to be having some noticeable health impact.

Ahem. Not among the folks I mix with. That would be recognized instantly as a problem.

I guess the real problem is, alcoholics tend to mix with other alcoholics. Makes their life seem normal? I read that 50% of the business of liquor stores is by 10% of their customers. Definitely some modal populations going on.

> That would be recognized instantly as a problem.

Really? I didn't get drunk every day. I just drank a beer every day. I really don't think anybody would consider that a problem.

It depends on the person. If you're not dependent upon it and you can immediately give it up without ill effects, then it's not much of a problem. What makes this article and paper so interesting is that there's a real physical and mechanistic basis for why some people can handle it, and why others can't, which makes a lot of sense. The experimental design to model addictive behaviours looks clean, simple and elegant and with it identifying similar population subsets to humans, maybe we'll eventually see some genetic, epigenetic or developmental basis for that difference be elucidated.

I'm unfortunate to have known two people who became alcoholics, and it was incredibly sad and frustrating to see their irrational, self-destructive behaviour ruin both their health and their relationships. I do hope that this will lead to effective treatments for alcoholism, and perhaps other addictive behaviours which involve the same underlying mechanisms. It looks like the current drugs aren't that effective, but now that we know which areas and pathways to target things might proceed much faster.

> It depends on the person. If you're not dependent upon it and you can immediately give it up without ill effects, then it's not much of a problem.

But that's the problem. How do you know? I seriously doubt anyone here would try to intervene if they discovered a friend had a beer every day. Yet that could easily be the beginning of a problem.

It's very difficult, for certain. As is clear from this thread, "normal" levels of drinking can vary wildly between people and social groups. For the two people I know, it wasn't an overnight thing. They were already fairly regular drinkers, and at some point it got out of control, either by some triggering incident or something else.

One thing I'm grateful for is that because alcohol affects me greatly I'm careful to never drink more than three pints when I go out with friends; usually one is more than enough. And after seeing the horrible effects of alcoholism, I made a conscious effort to reduce the frequency from a few times a week to a few times a month, and feel a whole lot better for it.

And there's the 'cohort normalization' distinction right there. My crowd doesn't do that.

I don't know who these people are that consider a beer a day an issue. I assume you, it's completely normal and there is nothing wrong with it.

what's the point of a comment like this when it concerns a substance that clearly isn't harmless to many people? Do you just feel a need to express how things work for you, personally? Or are you trying to make some kind of point?

I'm glad to see work being done here. Recovery rates from Alcoholism are grim by every measure I've seen. There have been similar breakdowns with Monkeys consuming alcohol as well, if I remember correctly. With 15% preferring alcohol to sugary drinks, and roughly 5% becoming highly problematic consumers.

Are there any studies on self destructive behavior that have a useful conclusion? All addicts I know are aware of the damage they do, yet I haven't seen studies about this kind of behavior.

Here's the NIH overview of addiction treatment, summarizing thousands of studies:

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/principles-drug-addic...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678283/#S14

The proposed chemical mechanism sounds similar to the pattern that led to SSRIs - selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors - in that the brain normally has a balance of counter-acting chemicals, but problems arise when the balance or counter-action fails.

When the rat's heartless wife leaves him after 10 years of supporting her... takes their toddler... Condemning them both to financial ruin - and the rat doesn't want a drink. I'll believe they've cured alcoholism.

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