Abstract
Young adult binge drinkers represent a model for endophenotypic risk factors for alcohol misuse and early exposure to repeated binge cycles. Chronic or harmful alcohol use leads to neurochemical, structural and morphological neuroplastic changes, particularly in regions associated with reward processing and motivation. We investigated neural microstructure in 28 binge drinkers compared with 38 matched healthy controls. We used a recently developed diffusion magnetic resonance imaging acquisition and analysis, which uses three‐compartment modelling (of intracellular, extracellular and cerebrospinal fluid) to determine brain tissue microstructure features including neurite density and orientation dispersion index (ODI). Binge drinkers had reduced ODI, a proxy of neurite complexity, in frontal cortical grey matter and increased ODI in parietal grey matter. Neurite density was higher in cortical white matter in adjacent regions of lower ODI in binge drinkers. Furthermore, binge drinkers had higher ventral striatal grey matter ODI that was positively correlated with binge score. Healthy volunteers showed no such relationships. We demonstrate disturbed dendritic complexity of higher‐order prefrontal and parietal regions, along with higher dendritic complexity of a subcortical region known to mediate reward‐related motivation. The findings illustrate novel microstructural abnormalities that may reflect an infnce of alcohol bingeing on critical neurodevelopmental processes in an at‐risk young adult group.
Highlights
Binge drinking, the rapid intake of alcohol in short bursts of time, is a serious public health issue in the United Kingdom and United States, costing an estimated £4.9bn/year to British society (Francesconi 2015)
Neurite density was higher in cortical white matter in adjacent regions of lower orientation dispersion index (ODI) in binge drinkers
When restricting the analysis to ventral striatum, we find that binge drinkers show a positive correlation between ventral striatal ODI and binge score (Fig. 1) but not Alcohol Use Disorders Test (AUDIT) (p > 0.05)
Summary
The rapid intake of alcohol in short bursts of time, is a serious public health issue in the United Kingdom and United States, costing an estimated £4.9bn/year to British society (Francesconi 2015). This common pattern of alcohol intake has the highest prevalence in young adults (Kuntsche, Rehm & Gmel 2004; Grucza, Norberg & Bierut 2009), during a time of heightened risk-taking, impulsivity, neural (ventral striatal) response to rewards (Hill et al 2000; Braams et al 2015), and crucially, alongside ongoing neurodevelopment. Higher left dlpfc grey matter volume has been
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