Childhood Head Injury Increases Risk Of Alcohol Abuse In Females

Girls who underwent a concussive bump on the head during childhood are more likely to be at an increased risk for abusing alcohol as adults. The findings are published in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

In this recent study, researchers at the Ohio State University examined mice that received a concussive head injury at 21 days-equal to between 6 and 12 years old in humans. Later, the mice could chose between two bottles containing water and escalating doses of ethanol diluted in water.

Findings revealed that female adult mice that had been injured at 21 days of age drank significantly more than the uninjured mice. However, head injuries did not have an effect regarding drinking in male mice.

Physiological tests suggested that the injury had nothing to do with how the animals processed alcohol. To investigate further, researchers placed the mice in a box with visibly different patterns covering separate sections of the floor. Then, over 10 days, they injected them with alcohol in specific sections of the box and with saline in other sections.

"Then we let them walk back and forth between boxes. If they liked alcohol, they would spend more time on the side of the box associated with alcohol. Again, we saw this effect only in females that had been injured. They spent about 65 percent of their time in the box linked to alcohol," Zachary Weil, assistant professor of neuroscience at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study, said in a news release. "We had proven to ourselves that there is something about the way reward and pleasure is processed in these animals with regard to alcohol."

Lastly, researchers decided to put recently injured mice in bigger cages while running wheels, toys and tunnels. Through this means, they provided them with a new experience every week for six weeks. Control injured animals lived in standard housing conditions.

When the mice were tested for alcohol intake, the enriched environment had completely blocked the females' increase in drinking and also reduced axon damage in their brains by about 40 percent. In other words, the effects might be reversible in some cases. 

In future studies, researchers hope to study whether hormones play a role in the difference in alcoholism between males and females regarding juvenile head injuries.

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