Addictive Substances and Neurological Disease

Alcohol, Tobacco, Caffeine, and Drugs of Abuse in Everyday Lifestyles

Ronald Ross Watson,Sherma Zibadi

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128092965
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pathology

Addictive Substances and Neurological Disease: Alcohol, Tobacco, Caffeine, and Drugs of Abuse in Everyday Lifestyles is a complete guide to the manifold effects of addictive substances on the brain, providing readers with the latest developing research on how these substances are implicated in neurological development and dysfunction.

Cannabis, cocaine, and other illicit drugs can have substantial negative effects on the structure and functioning of the brain. However, other common habituating and addictive substances often used as part of an individual's lifestyle, i.e., alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, painkillers can also compromise brain health and effect or accentuate neurological disease.

This book provides broad coverage of the effects of addictive substances on the brain, beginning with an overview of how the substances lead to dysfunction before examining each substance in depth. It discusses the pathology of addiction, the structural damage resulting from abuse of various substances, and covers the neurobiological, neurodegenerative, behavioral, and cognitive implications of use across the lifespan, from prenatal exposure, to adolescence and old age.

This book aids researchers seeking an understanding of the neurological changes that these substances induce, and is also extremely useful for those seeking potential treatments and therapies for individuals suffering from chronic abuse of these substances.

• Integrates current research on the actions of addictive substances in neurological disease
• Includes functional foods, such as caffeine beverages, that have habituating effects on the brain
• Provides a synopsis of key ideas associated with the consequences of addictive and habituating lifestyle substances

Part I

Alcohol and Neurological Dysfunction

Outline

Chapter 1. Acute Ethanol-Induced Changes in Microstructural and Metabolite Concentrations on the Brain: Noninvasive Functional Brain Imaging

Chapter 2. Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Neuroglial Changes in Neurochemistry and Behavior in Animal Models

Chapter 3. Alcohol on Histaminergic Neurons of Brain

Chapter 4. Antenatal Alcohol and Histological Brain Disturbances

Chapter 5. Alcohol Intoxication and Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury: Basic and Clinical Science

Chapter 6. Visual and Auditory Changes After Acute Alcohol Ingestion

Chapter 7. Zebrafish Models of Alcohol Addiction

Chapter 8. Effect of Alcohol on the Regulation of α-Synuclein in the Human Brain

Chapter 9. Consumption of Ethanol and Tissue Changes in the Central Nervous System

Chapter 10. Ethanol Consumption and Cerebellar Disorders

Chapter 11. Gene Expression in CNS Regions of Genetic Rat Models of Alcohol Abuse

Chapter 12. Role of TLR4 in the Ethanol-Induced Modulation of the Autophagy Pathway in the Brain

Chapter 13. Ghrelinergic Signaling in Ethanol Reward

Chapter 14. Alcoholic Neurological Syndromes

Chapter 15. Frontal Lobe Dysfunction After Developmental Alcohol Exposure: Implications From Animal Models

Chapter 16. Ethanol's Action Mechanisms in the Brain: From Lipid General Alterations to Specific Protein Receptor Binding

Chapter 17. Antioxidant Vitamins and Brain Dysfunction in Alcoholics

Chapter 18. Serotonin Deficiency and Alcohol Use Disorders

Chapter 1

Acute Ethanol-Induced Changes in Microstructural and Metabolite Concentrations on the Brain

Noninvasive Functional Brain Imaging

W.B. Zheng The Second Affiliated Hospital, Medical College of Shantou University, Shantou, China

Abstract

In this review, we summarize recent studies highlighting acute brain responses to alcohol with the use of noninvasive functional brain imaging, how those images might explain behavioral effects of alcohol intoxication and, finally, how alcohol intoxication affects traumatic brain injury.

Keywords

Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC); Diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI); Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI); Ethyl alcohol (ETOH); Fractional anisotropy (FA); Functional brain Imaging; Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS); Mean kurtosis (MK); Resting-state fMRI (rf-MRI)

Introduction

Alcoholism is a major health issue that afflicts people all over the world. In addition, researchers have raised concerns about health and the social consequences of excessive drinking (Das, Balakrishnan, & Vasudevan, 2006). The consumption of alcohol and the subsequent production of its oxidative metabolites have many direct and indirect effects both on the developing and the developed nervous system, and have acute and chronic complications (Alderazi & Brett, 2007). Alcohol impairs cognitive function and is associated with a variety of behavioral changes resulting in deficits in perceptual and emotional function. Alcohol consumption has immediate effects on multiple cognitive–motor processing domains and leads to damage of multiple attentional abilities (Mongrain & Standing, 1989). Given the high prevalence of alcohol abuse, and the current limited and inefficient treatment options, the need for a better understanding of the effects of alcohol is clear (Nielsen & Nielsen, 2015).

Alcohol and Neurological Dysfunction

Historically, it is well documented that acute alcohol intoxication could result in changes in regional brain function, as assessed by changes in glucose metabolism or cerebral blood flow (Volkow et al., 1988, 1990), cognitive performance (Lau, Pihl, & Peterson, 1995; Lindman, Sjoholm, & Lang, 2000; Reynolds, Richards, & de Wit, 2006), motor function (Lemon, 1993), and behavior (Kong, Zheng, Lian, & Zhang, 2012; Zheng, Kong, Chen, Zhang, & Zheng, 2015; Mongrain & Standing, 1989).

Laboratory studies, which typically examine blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) in the range of 0.03–0.08%, indicate that, at these doses, the influence of alcohol on memory depends on the cognitive functions required by the particular experimental task (e.g., Bisby, Leitz, Morgan, & Curran, 2010; Söderlund, Parker, Schwartz, & Tulving, 2005).

Acute alcohol intake has pronounced effects on brain function in a general way. Until recently, the effect of alcohol on neural mechanisms had not been fully elucidated. These effects include neurotoxicity of the ethanol molecule itself, and the consequences of nutritional deficiencies or liver dysfunction, each of which can lead to the possibility of alcohol-induced neuro-inflammation. A number of measures have been used to investigate these issues. For example, George used the P300 event-related potentials (ERPs) component to assess the relationship of alcoholism with frontal lobe damage, indicating that the frontal lesion subject group of the study had significant P300 amplitude reduction. There was a similar trend for the alcohol-dependent group, but not for the subcortical group when compared to the control subjects (George, Potts, Kothman, Martin, & Mukundan, 2004).

The misuse of alcohol can affect the adult central and peripheral nervous systems, and direct effects are the result of the toxic and intoxicating effects of alcohol. It is well accepted that alcohol intoxication results in changes in physical and mental impairments including thought, judgment, coordination, concentration, and reasoning. Moreover, alcohol can lead to confusion, ataxia, and loss of social inhibition, and in some circumstances, aggression, putting a person at risk of traumatic injury.

Neuroimaging in Acute Ethanol Consumption

A number of measures have been used to examine the effects of acute ethanol consumption on the brain. Previously, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has been applied to the study of human chronic alcoholism. Early observations utilizing structural MR imaging studies reported that white matter (WM) subjacent to the cortex and the pons suffers structural volume in those with uncomplicated alcoholism. Specific brain regions affected by chronic alcohol exposure as determined on structural MR imaging include the cortical gray matter (GM) and WM, the thalamus (Bellis et al., 2005), and particularly the prefrontal areas in older alcoholic individuals (Cardenas, Studholme, & Gazdzinski, 2007).

Traditionally, neuroimaging has provided noninvasive anatomic views of the brain, but the applications of neuroimaging have now expanded to include the measurement of neurochemical concentrations and specific proteins, such as subtypes of neurotransmitter receptors or transporters, rates of metabolic pathways and blood flow, and the detection of functional or pharmacological changes in the brain and evaluations of connections among brain regions (Niciu & Mason, 2014). In vivo modern neuroimaging modalities, including diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provide important information regarding coexistent structural and functional brain damage, are powerful approaches to the study of brain function, and may provide novel opportunities for investigating the impact of alcohol on the nervous system. The effects of chronic alcohol exposure on the brain and its neurochemistry can be assessed through MRS (Kroenke et al., 2013). In addition, as the microstructural scale can also be assessed through DTI, neuroimaging has dramatically improved researchers' ability to understand the neuropathology of alcoholism (Nagel & Kroen, 2008). Neuroimaging data delineating alcohol effects on brain function are, however, scant. Therefore, the use of these techniques will no doubt provide important information in the near future regarding the mechanisms related to alcohol-induced brain function impairments. This chapter reviews what we have done, to date, regarding the specific imaging features of acute alcohol-induced brain dysfunction, including microstructural changes on the brain and metabolic product concentrations using these noninvasive functional brain imaging techniques.

DTI- and DKI-Detected Acute Ethanol-Induced Changes on Microstructures in the Brain

DTI has identified reduced diffusion anisotropy within the frontal WM of chronic alcoholics (Harris et al., 2008) in the genu of the corpus callosum, the centrum semiovale (Rosenbloom, Sullivan, & Pfefferbaum, 2003), and the frontal and superior sites, such as frontal forceps, internal and external capsules, and the fornix (Pfefferbaum, Rosenbl...