Study of brain energy patterns provides new insights into alcohol effects

Assessing the patterns of energy use and neuronal activity simultaneously in the human brain improves our understanding of how alcohol affects the brain, according to new research by scientists at the National Institutes of Health.

NIH scientists present a new method for combining measures of brain activity (left) and glucose consumption (right) to study regional specialization and to better understand the effects of alcohol on the human brain. Photo: Dr. Ehsan Shokri Kojori/NIAAA/CAPTION]

The brain uses a lot of energy compared to other body organs, and the association between brain activity and energy utilization is an important marker of brain health. This study introduces a new way of characterizing how brain activity is related to its consumption of glucose, which could be very useful in understanding how the brain uses energy in health and disease.

Alcohol significantly affects brain glucose metabolism, a measure of energy use, as well as regional brain activity, which is assessed through changes in blood oxygenation.

The findings from this study highlight the relevance of energetics for ensuring normal brain function and reveal how it is disrupted by excessive alcohol consumption.

In a group of healthy volunteers, the researchers showed that different brain regions that serve distinct functions have notably different power and different cost. They then investigated the effects of alcohol on these new measures by assessing a group of people that included light drinkers and heavy drinkers and found that both acute and chronic exposure to alcohol affected power and cost of brain regions.

“In heavy drinkers, we saw less regional power for example in the thalamus, the sensory gateway, and frontal cortex of the brain, which is important for decision making,” said Dr. Shokri-Kojori of the NIAAA Laboratory of Neuroimaging. “These decreases in power were interpreted to reflect toxic effects of long-term exposure to alcohol on the brain cells.”

The researchers also found a decrease in power during acute alcohol exposure in the visual regions, which was related to disruption of visual processing. At the same time, visual regions had the most significant decreases in cost of activity during alcohol intoxication, which is consistent with the reliance of these regions on alternative energy sources such as acetate, a byproduct of alcohol metabolism.

They conclude that despite widespread decreases in glucose metabolism in heavy drinkers compared to light drinkers, heavy drinking shifts the brain toward less efficient energetic states. (National Institutes of Health)

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