The Effects Of Alcohol on the Neuronal Subserving of Behavior in the Hippocampus

Alcohol is bad for our health, this is an old ,old topic.But few people know how does it do harm to our health.

Its effects can be divided into acute and chronic. Acute poisoning often happens in the oral.There are 4 stages: excited, hypnosis, anesthesia, choking.When in the third and forth stage, sufferers may experience loss of consciousness, pupil dilation, irregular breathing, shock, heart failure and stop breathing cycles. Chronic effects often happens when one exposure to high concentrations of this product for a long time.It often causes membrane irritation of nose, eyes, mucous,even headache, dizziness, fatigue, eas ily excited, tremor, nausea, etc. Long-term alcohol abuse can cause multiple neuropathy, chronic gastritis, fatty liver, cirrhosis of the liver, myocardium damage and organic psychosis and so on.

Besides the above effects, a research from Scientific Research Publishing found some other new effects of acute and chronic ethanol(the experiment is based on Hippocampus).The following is the general:

In the present study, we concentrate on the chronic effects of ethanol on the hippocampus. We demonstrate how the neuronal activity underlying food-acquisition behavior is modified after chronic ethanol treatment, and how the hippocampus subserves formation of newly-formed alcohol-acquisition behavior. Neuronal activity in CA1 was more sensitive to chronic ethanol than the Dg area. Acute administration of ethanol had a normalizing effect on the chronically-treated animals: their performance and the hippocampal neural activity approached a normal range. The sets of neurons involved in food-acquisition behavior formed before chronic ethanol treatment, and those involved in alcohol-acquisition behavior formed after treatment significantly overlapped supporting the view that the neuronal mechanisms of pre-existing behavior provide the basis for the formation of new behavior. Additionally, we also discovered alcohol-acquisition selective neurons. Assuming that the formation of new neuronal specializations underlies learning, we believe that alcohol-selective neurons are specialized during the formation of alcohol-acquisition behavior. Our data demonstrate several new findings on the effect of acute and chronic ethanol on hippocampus activity, and how the neuronal activity relates to behavior before and after ethanol treatment.

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