Alcohol-Energy Drinks' Allure? It's the Dopamine

There's an explanation for the addictive quality of the spate of new caffeine-laced alcoholic beverages like Associated Brewing's Axis, United Brands's Max and Phusion Projects's Four Loko (the drink of record when nine Central Washington University students were hospitalized--some with lethal alcohol blood levels--after a party last month.) It turns out it all comes down to dopamine, the wily little neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of reward and motivation, and which is intimately tied up in cocaine and heroin addiction.

We think this excerpt from a Scientific American interview with Thomas Gould, associate professor of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, neatly sums up what's happening when kids drink these cocktails in a can, which are already banned in Michigan, Oklahoma and by the Chicago City Council (New York is considering the same.) A single can of an alcohol energy drink can deliver a six pack of beer's worth of alcohol along with a caffeine dose equal to 3 cups of espresso. A far cry from the old rum and Coke, the lethal potency of these drinks gave a heart attack to one young kid in the state of Washington.

Scientific American: What effect does the simultaneous consumption of alcohol and caffeine have on the body?
Dr. Gould: "Alcohol is a sedative. It works in part by potentiating the GABAergic neurotransmitter system. GABA [gamma-aminobutyric acid] is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. When the neurons in the brain release GABA, it acts to slow down or inhibit other neural processes. This can reduce anxiety, increase relaxation while sedating a person. With higher levels of alcohol, problems can arise as important neural and other bodily systems become overinhibited and shut down.

Compared to alcohol, caffeine is on the other end of the spectrum of psychoactive drugs in that it is a stimulant. Caffeine is an antagonist for the neurotransmitter adenosine. Adenosine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter; so similar to GABA,adenosine can dampen or inhibit other neural processors. With caffeine, we have a double negative in that it inhibits an inhibitory neurotransmitter and thus increase levels of arousal and alertness—but higher doses can produce nervousness, anxiety and tachycardia.

One thing both drugs do is increase dopamine levels. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with reward. One thing all drugs of abuse have in common is the ability to activate the dopamine system. The ability of alcohol and caffeine to stimulate the dopamine system may be one factor contributing to their use.

Because the drugs in a sense have opposite effects, one might expect that simultaneous consumption may reduce the effects that are seen when each drug is administered alone, but it really is not as simple as that. Some effects may be reduced while others are increased, and this may vary as the doses of the drugs vary."

Read the entire interview in Scientific American.

Update on Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 9:13AM by Kathy

Buying Rush Follows Ban on Four Loko: Students rushed to stock up on the alcohol energy drink, Four Loko, when a ban was announced in the state of Washington. Read the story in The Seattle Times.

Making the Brain Better at Math

British scientists have accomplished the neat little trick of finding out exactly where to send an electrical current into the brain to make people better at math. Apparently the key lies in the parietal lobe. Only one hitch, it would be awfully hard to sneak electrodes into an exam.

Read the story from the BBC.

Study: Ecstacy May Be Useful in PTSD Therapy

Researchers believe they have found the next step in PTSD therapy: MDMA--commonly known as ecstacy--usage in therapeutic environments. In a recent Phase II study published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, psychologists found using MDMA during PTSD therapy sessions allowed patients to better manage and understand their emotions than with traditional therapy methods alone.

"PTSD treatment involves revisiting the trauma in a therapeutic setting, but many patients become overwhelmed by anxiety or numb themselves emotionally, and so they can't really successfully engage," says study lead researcher Dr. Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C. "But what we found is that the MDMA seemed to temporarily decrease fear without blunting emotions, and so it helped patients better process their grief." After the study completed, 10 of the 12 patients treated with MDMA and therapy no longer suffered from clinical PTSD, compared with two of eight placebo patients.

The intense therapy programs included two all-day therapy sessions and overnight visits in the therapy clinic. A long-term follow-up study of the patients is already under way.

Read the source article.

New Insight Into How Mistakes Are Remembered

Your brain strives to put mistakes like infidelity in the past.In a clever little study that answers the question of how does one live with oneself after cheating on a spouse or committing some other moral indiscretion, researchers have found that the mind tries to put distance between us and our mistakes. The new research in the journal Emotion (which frankly sounds like one of the only medical journals worth keeping on the bedside table) manages to catch people's memories in the act of revision. In the study, people dated their moral failings 10 years earlier on average than their good deeds. 

“People honestly view their past in a morally critical light, but at the same time they tend to emphasize that they have been improving,” the authors concluded.

Other researchers have recorded similar mind tricks. Students who did poorly on an exam tend to sense the experience as further in the past than tests on which they did well and took at about the same time. Future selves tend to be the best of all. The unwritten potential of a future self scores consistently higher on a moral scale than either a present or past self image. This has been called the "ascending-toward-heaven autobiography."

“We can’t make up the past, but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we’re able to shift elements around,” Anne E. Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, told The New York Times in an article about the study. “The result is that we can create a personal history that, if not perfect, makes us feel we’re getting better and better.”

When Men Lecture Women About Pregnancy and Stress

This new book spurs the debate over the effects of stress during pregnancy.Origins, Annie Murphy Paul's great book about the how everything in the world around you effects your unborn child reignites the eternal nature vs nurture debate, and has left two usually incisive writers at odds over whether or not stress is good for a baby in the womb. Both esteemed Harvard doctor Jerome Groopman and Pulitzer Prize winning Op-Ed contributor Nicholas Kristof wrote about the book in the New York Times. But were they reading the same book? 

Groopman writes: "Women who reported moderate daily anxiety and stress during pregnancy had children who scored higher in tests of motor and mental development at age 2."

But Kristof has this to say, "Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation."

You might chalk this inconsistency up to different definitions of stress. Maybe Groopman is talking about the stress a woman experiences at a stressful but high paying job, while Kristof is referring to the unrelenting stress of grinding poverty--two very different animals. However, the two deep thinkers also managed to find opposing scientific explanations for the effects they chose to write about.

Groopman: "The placenta breaks down the stress hormone cortisol in the woman's blood, preventing most of it from reaching the fetus."

Kristof: "Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious."

Come on guys, make up your minds. Both writers recognize that living through a catastrophic event during gestation--Hurricane Katrina or the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War--has demonstrably negative repercussions on a child's development. But the take-away message of Origins was radically different for these two writers. And woefully, the ever-hysterical debate about how pregnant women should live their lives rages on.

Click here to read Jerome Groopman's book review, and here to read Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed. Click here to see Healthline.com's cool graphic showing 20 effects of stress on the body.

Dr. Merrell's Tip: Whatever your stress level during pregnancy (and it's hard to find anyone these days who doesn't have tremendous stress in their lives) it's important to cultivate a stress-reduction practice such as breath exercises, meditation or biofeedback, which can reduce the level of stress hormones circulating in the blood stream, lower blood pressure and increase feelings of well-being.