UNDER THE INFLUENCE: A rat helps itself to gelatin laced with booze as part of a study to look at the effects of alcohol consumption on decision-making.
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It's no secret that binge drinking and faulty decision-making go hand in hand, but what if poor judgment lingered long after putting the bottle down and sobering up? A new study with rats suggests that heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence could put people on the road to risky behavior.
Several studies have associated heavy drinking in youth with impaired judgment in adulthood, but these studies didn't resolve whether alcohol abuse actually predisposes people to develop bad decision-making skills, or if the people who indulged in excessive inebriation were risk-taking types to begin with. As Selena Bartlett, a director in the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, explains, you cannot put adolescents in a room and ask them to consume alcohol to see what happens. But scientists can conduct these kinds of experiments with rats, an animal that Bartlett, who was not part of the study, says is "excellent for modeling changes in behavior" as a result of alcoholism.
In the new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle fed alcohol to a group of rats and found that their ability to make good decisions was impaired even long after they stopped consuming booze.
Because rats do not normally have a taste for alcohol, the researchers sweetened the deal, literally, by mixing the liquor in glucose gelatin. For 20 days one group of rats helped themselves to these "Jell-O shots" (a second group downed a nonalcoholic version). Although the animals consumed large amounts of alcohol over the course of each day, they paced themselves, and did not show signs of drunkenness or withdrawal when the researchers cut them off. Several weeks after the guzzler rodents stopped receiving the spiked gelatin, the researchers trained the animals to push a pair of levers in order to receive sugar pellets.
The group of rodents that had been "dry" for the 20 days preferred the lever that led to the smaller and more consistent allotment of treats. The group that had consumed the alcohol, on the other hand, opted for the lever that, like a slot machine, offered a rare but hefty payoff. Even though the rats knew that the total number of treats from the second lever had never caught up with the output from the first, the alcohol-exposed group chased after the low likelihood of a sugar pellet windfall.
Going into the study, "the gut feeling was that we'd see a graded effect [on decision-making] that would be diminished" over time, says Nicholas Nasrallah, a graduate student in the U.W. Department of Psychology and the first author of the study. But the researchers found that the tendency to make imprudent decisions did not fade for up to three months after the rats stopped consuming alcohol.
To further investigate whether alcohol has a causal and lasting effect on decision-making, the group plans to see if the boozing rats have chemical changes in the areas of the brain that control valuation. "One of the studies that I'm most excited about," Nasrallah says, "is really watching the brain in real-time [to] see if there are differences in the way these areas seem to signal" in animals that were exposed to alcohol. Bartlett at the Gallo Center says that understanding the mechanisms that underlie risky behavior could allow her and others develop better treatments to help people recover from alcoholism.
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12 Comments
Add CommentThis has to be one of the most idiotic things I've ever read.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Even though the rats knew that the total number of treats from the second lever had never caught up with the output from the first"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do we suddenly know what rats know? What?
I also think this research is not very good. Using rats to do some medical research, I can understand. However, it's a little unconvincing that employing rats to study the effect of alcohol on decision-making.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's a good experiment assuming there was a lot of rats used. With such a speculative hypothesis, you would need large data sets to determine anything worthwhile. The study doesn't address one of the questions posed in the synopsis though. There is no attempt to determine if preference for alcohol as a "bad decision" is any kind of predisposition in any of the rats. Phase 2 maybe?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI didn't start drinking until my late 30's. Since then my risk taking has fallen to almost zero. What are the numbers? Maybe the research had something to offer, but the article didn't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would remove this article. You are going to discredit your whole site with this silly experiment that is very flawed in several ways.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would remove this article from this site, because it will discredit this site. It is a very flawed and silly experiment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat this article needs is more numbers. Please provide the number of tries for the entire population preferring the "consistent small piece treat" lever to the "rare but bigger treat" lever; so that we can see that rats "understand" the choice. And of course the repetitious behavior of the drunken rats to go for the "rare but bigger treat a.k.a. slot machine" regardless of the location they are placed in the cage (rule out distance, chance, pure coincidence etc). Without these numbers, the experiment is quite fun to read, but not scientific at all. The article should have a second page with more numerical data: facts, facts, facts!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts a study to see if heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence leads to poor decision-making later in life, not if you started drinking in your 30's. I can tell you without a doubt that it does, especially in females. Not that what I say matters to anyone reading this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts a study to see if heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence leads to poor decision-making later in life, not if you started drinking in your 30's. I can tell you without a doubt that it does, especially in females. Not that what I say matters to anyone reading this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTeens who indulge in heavy alcohol consumption are just bad decision making people.... you make poor decisions because of the way you think...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe know that "Even though the rats knew" because previous studies are much better at calculating odds by avoiding noise than humans in gambling simulations. That's why rats are never allowed in casinos but bankers are.....
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