The effects of acute alcohol administration on the human brain: insights from neuroimaging

Abstract

Over the last quarter century, researchers have peered into the living human brain to develop and refine mechanistic accounts of alcohol-induced behavior, as well as neurobiological mechanisms for development and maintenance of addiction. These in vivo neuroimaging studies generally show that acute alcohol administration affects brain structures implicated in motivation and behavior control, and that chronic intoxication is correlated with structural and functional abnormalities in these same structures, where some elements of these decrements normalize with extended sobriety. In this review, we will summarize recent findings about acute human brain responses to alcohol using neuroimaging techniques, and how they might explain behavioral effects of alcohol intoxication. We then briefly address how chronic alcohol intoxication (as inferred from cross-sectional differences between various drinking populations and controls) may yield individual brain differences between drinking subjects that may confound interpretation of acute alcohol administration effects. This article is part of the Special Issue Section entitled 'Neuroimaging in Neuropharmacology'.

Keywords: Addiction; Alcohol; Neuroimaging; Positron Emission Tomography; fMRI.

Fig. 1

Linear contrast between fearful vs. neutral faces under placebo and alcohol conditions. Increased activation to fearful faces is shown in yellow/orange (p < 0.01), while increased activation to neutral faces is shown in blue (p < 0.01). In the placebo condition (top panels), there was greater activation to fearful than to neutral faces in the amygdala (circled in red), parahippocampal gyrus, and visual cortex. These activations were not significant in the alcohol condition (bottom panels). Images copyright 2008, Journal of Neuroscience.