Don’t Let Your Child Become a Statistic!

LYME-OLD LYME — Did you know that roughly one third of of alcohol-related traffic fatalities happen during Prom/Graduation/Summer season? Approximately 1,000 young people under 21 will die from preventable tragedy in the coming months according to the National Highway and Safety Administration.

This season the Lyme-Old Lyme Prevention Coalition (LOLPC) is encouraging youth to make smart decisions around alcohol.

The average first use of alcohol in Lyme-Old Lyme (LOL) is at 14-years-old and rates of use rise rapidly during high school years.

Only 56 percent of LOL youth report having clear family rules about alcohol use.

The LOLPC urges parents not to let their child become a statistic. Talk to to your children about the risks of drinking alcohol — highlight the facts from the article below. It is never too early to start role-modeling healthy choices about alcohol. Discuss rules and strategies for discussing this special time of year.

You have more influence than you realize!

How Binge Drinking Affects the Teen Brain

You have surely heard that misusing alcohol hurts your health. But how many years of drinking do you think it takes to visibly affect your brain? Ten years? Twenty?

It turns out that it doesn’t take that long at all—in fact, scientists can already see changes in the brains of teenagers who drink.

Blocking the Signals

In a research study, Professor Susan Tapert of the University of California at San Diego used an MRI imaging machine to scan the brains of teens who binge drink—defined as drinking four or five (or more) drinks in a couple of hours. Dr. Tapert found that the “white matter” in their brains—the part that transmits signals, like a TV cable or a computer USB cord—was abnormal compared with the white matter of teens who don’t binge drink.

Transmitting signals is a large part of what the brain does, so affecting the white matter in this way could also affect a person’s thinking, learning, and memory.

The really worrying part is that these teens didn’t have an alcohol use disorder, and they didn’t drink every day. All they did (to be considered “binge drinkers”) was drink at least four (for women) or five (for men) drinks in one sitting, at least one time during the previous three months.

How could it be possible for just a few sessions of heavy drinking to affect the white matter of the brain? Well, science has shown that alcohol can poison brain cells and alter the brain’s white matter in adults with an alcohol use disorder.

Dr. Tapert thinks that teenagers’ brains are even more susceptible this way. She says, “because the brain is still developing during adolescence, there has been concern that it may be more vulnerable to high doses of alcohol.”

Cause or Effect?

Many questions still remain, including how long it takes before these changes occur, and how much they affect the brain’s different functions. To figure this out, scientists would have to look at the binge drinkers’ brains before and after they started drinking. That way, they can tell if the differences might have already been there before the teens started drinking.

It’s possible that having abnormal white matter in the brain somehow increases the chance of being a binge drinker. In order to answer that question, Dr. Tapert says they need to do longer studies that follow teens’ brain growth over time.

The bottom line? If you’re a teen, drinking to the point of getting drunk could damage the white matter of your brain—even if you do it only once in a while.

Editor’s Notes: (i)This article, which was submitted by the Lyme-Old Lyme Prevention Coalition, is sourced from Alcohol and the Adolescent Brain: What We’ve Learned and Where the Data Are Taking Us | Alcohol Research: Current Reviews (nih.gov).

(ii)For more information about the Lyme-Old Lyme Prevention Coalition, getting involved, and ways to talk to youth about underage drinking please visit www.lysb.org/prevention.