Chronic ethanol produces sex-dependent impairments in striatum computations | Hacker News Reader

Chronic ethanol produces sex-dependent impairments in striatum computations

science.org

41 pointsgnabgib32 comments

The duration of these effects is particularly notable - the study found differences in male rats even 10+ weeks after the last ethanol exposure, suggesting potentially long-lasting effects that persist well into abstinence.

These rodents were huffing vaporized ethanol for 16 hours a day at ~.2 BAC on weekdays and then they left them on weekends for four weeks straight. That is quite the bender.

(…in mice)

This is very interesting! As a layman, I was aware that men and women had different alcohol tolerances but had no idea that there were more crucial neurological differences.

Could it because of differences in physiology? No:

“The observed sex differences in DMS sensitivity to EtOH are unlikely to result from basic physiological properties of the recorded cells, since these properties are similar across sexes. While estrous cycle can influence female neural physiology, sampling across several weeks likely averaged out these cycle-dependent changes in the present study”

"No difference in physiology" ignores the general presence of a very different endocrine system.

And, indeed, ethanol is an endocrine disruptor. The endocrine system, in turn, is known to influence neuroplasticity. Given that estrogen and testosterone impact neuroplasticity in the DMS via different pathways, there's a good chance that plays a role.

As wild speculation, estrogen acts as an inhibitor for long-term potentiation (or strengthening of synaptic connections), which lends mild support to the idea that it could prevent changes in outcome-related encoding. (The paper points out a possible mechanism, as footnote 72. I admit I was too lazy to read it, so it might well say that this was a really bad theory.)

In general, whenever something weird happens that has observable differences across sexes, blaming the endocrine system is a good first go-to strategy ;) Hormones are extremely powerful influences in our body.

Anecdata, sample size of one, so obviously take what I say with a giant grain of salt.

Due to a sleep apnea diagnosis, I don't drink any alcohol anymore at all, and outside of a single White Russian at a friend's house last Halloween, I haven't had anything to drink in more than two years.

Even before that, I didn't drink a lot, and I don't think anyone would classify me as an alcoholic, but I definitely felt like when I did drink, especially if I got drunk a part of me would kind of feel "different" in a sort of intangible way, well after I sobered up, sometimes for what felt like weeks.

It's kind of hard to explain, just sort of an odd, lingering sort of ethereal feeling that persisted.

I kind of thought it was just in my head, some sort of psychosomatic thing, but now I'm wondering if it was a physiological effect that messed with my brain.

I don't miss drinking, I fortunately never really developed that vice, and now I'm glad that I never got into it. I don't do other drugs either; I don't even consume caffeine anymore, so I'm especially lame :)

neat how you always have to dig in yourself in order to find out whether or not "sex-dependent" means chromosomal or endocrine differences. good thing those are in perfect lockstep or else we'd have to worry that we habitually gloss over such salient aspects.

Not surprising at all. Ethanol/Alcohol is literally poison.

As is water in large quantities

If you're comparing alcohol to water you may be an alcoholic.

The point is this study has nothing to do with alcohol being a "poison" , that's completely irrelevant to what was tested and discovered.

If you don't think alcohol is a posion we have bigger problems than this study.

I don't get it. Is poison generally sex-dependent?

They're just teedioustotal.

I don't know. If it's not a poison, why do they call it "alcohol poisoning"? Go figure it out.

What? Maybe I was unclear. I'm not saying it's not a poison. It seems like I walked into some entrenched debate and I don't even know what it is. Is it obvious that alcohol has sex specific effects? I didn't know. Is this some kind of culture war thing?

There's "poisoning" from lots of stuff that we wouldn't traditionally classify as "poison", like water [1] or oxygen [2].

I am not a chemist or a doctor, but I think the common adage is "it's the dose that makes the poison". Most stuff is bad for you if you get too much of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity

Some of their side effects can obviously be sex-dependent thus this study.

You say obvious. I say I've never heard of it. Interesting to me anyway.

Sometimes, yes. For example:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5677564/

beer goggles??

In rats

This should have been part of the title, because the abstract says the results are that men handle booze worse than women, which is the opposite in humans.

Watch out: men typically are more habituated and bigger, both of which are confounders.

True, true. What's interesting about this study is that the girl rats were unfazed while the boy rats had hangovers. Do their livers work differently? With humans it's not stark like that.

This is about long-term effects, not the day after, or during.

So what? Are you saying that long term effects are worse in men than women in humans? Because that's not true.

Do you know of a study that shows that long term effects in men and women are the same or worse in women?

The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy

https://psmag.com/social-justice/truth-wont-admit-drinking-h...

Terrible article, it probably wasn't true them, and we certainly know better now.

This is very outdated information. The old research didn't account for alcoholics in the non drinkers bucket. Now the researchers have shown that any amount of alcohol is bad for you

I'm no teetotaler, but this article is wildly misleading. Many of the longevity benefits claimed are just selection bias.

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