Alcohol Leaves a Mark on DNA in Young, Healthy People

Alcohol can leave its mark in many ways. Now, scientists have found that it can also impact DNA. Researchers have discovered that a weekend of alcohol consumption can affect the lipids comprising cell membrane and its genetic material.

Alcoholism is a global problem. Consuming too much of it poses a significant health, social and economic problem. In fact, alcohol is responsible for 2.5 million deaths a year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. While the effects of alcohol abuse have been studied in people who have been consuming alcohol for a long time, though, researchers have done little research on what alcohol does to young, healthy people.

In order to better understand how alcohol could influence young people, the researchers divided volunteers into two groups: a control group made up of students who did not drink alcohol and a study group made up of students who drank on weekends. To make sure that they were healthy, the scientists conducted blood tests on the volunteers, who ranged in ages between 18 and 23.

So what did they find? The researchers examined the activity of the alcohol enzyme dehydrogenase, which is responsible for metabolizing ethanol into acetaldehyde, acetoacetate and acetone. Oxidative damage was evaluated by a TBARS biochemical test and reflected the lipid peroxidation that affected the membrane due to the impact of ethanol in the blood and acetaldehyde produced by the action of the enzyme on the alcohol.

"We saw that the ones who drank sustained twice as much oxidative damage compared with the groupd that did not consume alcohol," said Adela Rendon, one of the researchers, in a news release. The scientists also assessed whether the DNA was also affected. "The interesting thing is that if the chromatin is not properly compacted, if the DNA has been damaged, it leaves a halo in the electrophoresis." In the end, the researchers found damage in 8 percent of the cells in the control group and 44 percent in the group that drank alcohol.

Currently, researchers aren't sure exactly how alcohol manages to alter DNA. Yet it does reveal that even some alcohol consumption can drastically impact a person. The researchers hope to take a closer look at how this social alcohol abuse could cause damage in the long term.

The findings are published in the journal Alcohol.