Women’s tendency to drink alcohol without moderation is stimulated by a hormone – estrogen. This is shown by the results of a study published in the peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal “Natural Communications”.
Specifically, estrogen causes women to “subject” themselves to alcohol in advance or to consume large amounts of alcohol without moderation in the first half hour after it is offered, the results show.
This study provides the first explanation for gender-related differences in alcohol drinking, says senior researcher Kristen Plyle, an associate professor of pharmacology at Cornell University School of Medicine in New York.
“Estrogen has a very powerful effect on many behaviors, especially in women,” Plyle says, adding, “So it makes sense that it would modulate binge drinking.”
During the pandemic lockdowns, women have increased their consumption of hard alcohol more than men, recent studies show. Women also have more alcohol-related hospital visits than men.
For the study, the researchers fed lab mice alcohol while monitoring the mice’s estrogen levels.
They found that when female mice had high levels of estrogen in their blood, they drank more than when their estrogen levels were low.
Binge drinking was also associated with increased activity in an area of the brain’s limbic system that has previously been linked to drinking behavior, the researchers added.
“When a woman takes the first sip from a bottle of alcohol, these neurons go crazy,” says Plail. “And if she’s in a high-estrogen state, they go even crazier.”
This extra boost in neural activity means that the mice drink even more, especially in the first 30 minutes after it’s given, the researchers found.
The team also notes that estrogen directly excites these neurons—a surprising finding, considering that the hormone usually influences behavior through a process that takes hours to change gene activity, rather than by targeting brain cells directly.
“We think this is the first time anyone has shown that estrogen, produced by the ovaries, can use such a rapid mechanism to control behavior,” Plail says.
The researchers plan to study whether the same system can regulate drinking in men. “The whole infrastructure is there in men: the estrogen receptors and the basic organization of the circuit,” Plail says.
The only difference is the source of the estrogen, the researchers explain – estrogen in men is created by the conversion of the male hormone testosterone into a female hormone.
These results could also point to a way to treat alcoholism by suppressing either estrogen levels or estrogen’s effect on brain cells, the researchers conclude.
Illustrative Photo by Toni Cuenca: https://www.pexels.com/photo/lemonade-on-brown-surface-616836/
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First published in this link of The European Times.
