Category: Addiction

The speed at which we drink alcohol may be influenced by the shape of the glass we drink from, according to new research from the University of Bristol, published in PLoS ONE. This could be a target to help control the problematic levels of drunkenness that are becoming increasingly common in our society.

Dr Angela Attwood and colleagues from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology recruited 160 social drinkers aged 18-40 with no history of alcoholism to attend two experimental sessions. At one session they were asked to drink either lager or a non-alcoholic soft drink from either a straight-sided glass or a curved 'beer flute'.

The participants were almost twice as slow when drinking alcohol from the straight-sided glass compared to the curved glass. There was no difference in drinking rates from the glasses when the drink was non-alcoholic.

The researchers suggest that the reason for this may be because it is more difficult to accurately judge the halfway point of shaped glasses. As a result, drinkers are less able to gauge how much they have consumed.

In order to test this, participants attended another session in which they completed a computer task that presented numerous pictures of the two glasses containing varying volumes of liquid. By asking participants to judge whether the glass was more or less than half full, the researchers were able to show that there was greater error in accurately judging the halfway point of the curved glass.

Importantly, the degree of this error seemed to be associated with the speed of drinking. That is, the participants who tended to show the greatest error in their halfway judgments tended to show the greatest changes in drinking rate.

The speed at which an alcoholic beverage is drunk will influence the level of intoxication experienced, and also the number of drinks consumed in a single drinking session. Therefore, slowing drinking rates is likely to have positive impact for the individual and also at a population level.

Dr Attwood said: "Due to the personal and societal harms associated with heavy bouts of drinking, there has been a lot of recent interest in alcohol control strategies. While many people drink alcohol responsibly, it is not difficult to have 'one too many' and become intoxicated. Because of the negative effects alcohol has on decision making and control of behaviour, this opens us up to a number of risks.

"People often talk of 'pacing themselves' when drinking alcohol as a means of controlling levels of drunkenness, and I think the important point to take from our research is that the ability to pace effectively may be compromised when drinking from certain types of glasses."

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Journal Reference:

1. Angela S. Attwood, Nicholas E. Scott-Samuel, George Stothart, Marcus R. Munaf. Glass Shape Influences Consumption Rate for Alcoholic Beverages. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (8): e43007 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043007

A new study published in a special issue of Substance Abuse finds that recovering alcoholics who help others in 12-step programs furthers their time sober, consideration for others, step-work, and long-term meeting attendance.

These novel findings are from a 10-year, prospective investigation led by Maria Pagano, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the "Helping Others" study (http://helpingotherslivesober.org). Dr. Pagano and colleagues evaluated the decade long of treatment outcomes using data from a single site in Project MATCH, the largest multi-site randomized clinical trial on behavioral treatments of alcoholism sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In a large sample with high representation of Hispanic problem drinkers, this study investigated the 10-year course and impact of programmatic activities in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) on long-term outcomes. Results showed that participation in Alcoholics Anonymous-related Helping (AAH) produced lowered alcohol use and increased interest in others at each subsequent follow-up assessment.

"Our study is the first to explore the 10-year course of engagement in programmatic 12-step activities and their simultaneous influence on long-term outcomes," says Dr. Pagano. "The AAH findings suggest the importance of getting active in service, which can be in a committed 2-month AA service position or as simple as sharing one's personal experience in recovery to another fellow sufferer."

This study also found that alcoholics engaged in AAH did more step-work and attended more meetings than those not helping others. In effect, AAH strengthens the commitment to the program that many newcomers have difficulty with in the beginning.

"Consequently, being interested in others keeps you more connected to your program and pulls you out of the vicious cycle of extreme self-preoccupation that is a posited root of addiction," says Dr. Pagano.

Dr. Pagano's continued research in this area is exploring whether or not similar patterns emerge among minors in recovery.

Be warned, popularity may cause lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema.

New research from the University of Southern California (USC) and University of Texas finds that popular students in seven Southern California high schools are more likely to smoke cigarettes than their less popular counterparts.

The study, which appears online this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health, confirms trends observed in previous USC-led studies of students in the sixth through 12th grades across the United States and in Mexico.

"That we're still seeing this association more than 10 years later, despite marginal declines in smoking, suggests that popularity is a strong predictor of smoking behavior," said Thomas W. Valente, Ph.D., professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and lead author of three prior studies on the subject.

In the newest study, Valente and colleagues asked 1,950 students in the ninth and 10th grades in October 2006 and 2007 whether they had ever tried smoking, how frequently they had smoked in the past 30 days, how many students their age they thought smoked cigarettes, how they perceived their close friends felt about smoking, and who their five best friends were at school. Popularity was measured by the frequency that other respondents named a student as a friend.

The researchers found that those who believed their close friends smoked were more likely to also smoke, even if their perception was incorrect. Popular students became smokers earlier than the less popular. And students who became smokers between the ninth and 10th grade were more likely to form friendships with other smokers.

Surprisingly, student perception of the norm (i.e., out of 100 students your age, how many do you think smoke cigarettes once a month or more?) was less likely to influence smoking than the perceived behavior of their close friends.

In a 2012 study that appeared in Salud Pública de México, the bi-monthly journal published by the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Institute of Public Health), Valente and colleagues at the Mexican Social Security Institute surveyed 399 teenagers at a high school in Jalisco. Two other studies — one in 2005 that polled 1,486 students in the sixth and seventh grades across Southern California and another in 2001 that polled 2,525 high-school students across the United States — also appeared in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"Adolescence is a time when students turn to others to figure out what is important. These are four different samples, now, coming from different places — and the finding is consistent," Valente said.

The study, "A comparison of peer influence measures as predictors of smoking among predominately Hispanic/Latino high school adolescents," was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, grant DA016310.

Thermal imaging technology might one day be to identify drunks before they become a nuisance in bars, airports or other public spaces. Georgia Koukiou and Vassilis Anastassopoulos of the Electronics Laboratory, at University of Patras, Greece, are developing software that can objectively determine whether a person has consumed an excessive amount of alcohol based solely on the relative temperature of different parts of the person's face.

Writing in the International Journal Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, the team explains how such a system sidesteps the subjective judgements one might make based on behaviour and so allow law enforcement and other authorities to have definitive evidence of inebriation.

The team explains how they have devised two algorithms that can determine whether a person has been drinking alcohol to excess based on infrared thermal imaging of the person's face. The first approach simply involves measuring pixel values of specific points on the person's face, which are the compared to values in a database of scans of sober and inebriated people. Given that alcohol causes dilation of blood vessels in the surface of the skin hot spots on the face can be seen in the thermal imaging scans, which can be classified as drunk or sober regions. Similar technology has been used at international borders and elsewhere to ascertain whether a person was infected with a virus, such as flu or SARS.

In their second approach, the team assesses the thermal differences between various locations on the face and evaluates their overall values. They found that increased thermal illumination is commonly seen in the nose in an inebriated individual whereas the forehead tends to be cooler. This second system relies on the algorithm "understanding" what different parts of the face are present in the thermal image. The two techniques working in parallel could be used to quickly scan individuals entering public premises or attempting to buy more alcohol, for instance. The team points out, however, that the second technique does not need a thermal image of the sober person to determine whether that individual has been drinking.

Non-smokers who live with or spend time with smokers are damaging their memory, according to new research from Northumbria University.

The findings, published in the latest online edition of the journal Addiction is the first study to explore the relationship between exposure to other people's smoke and everyday memory problems.

Dr Tom Heffernan and Dr Terence O'Neil, both researchers at the Collaboration for Drug and Alcohol Research Group at Northumbria University, compared a group of current smokers with two groups of non-smokers — those who were regularly exposed to second-hand smoke and those who were not.

Those exposed to second-hand smoke either lived with smokers or spent time with smokers, for example in a designated "smoking area," and reported being exposed to second-hand smoke for an average of 25 hours a week for an average of four and a half years.

The three groups were tested on time-based memory (remembering to carry out an activity after some time) and event-based memory (which refers to memory for future intentions and activities).

Researchers found that the non-smokers who had been exposed to second-hand smoke forgot almost 20% more in the memory tests than those non-smokers not exposed. However, both groups out-performed the current smokers who forgot 30% more than those who were not exposed to second-hand smoking.

Dr Heffernan said: "According to recent reports by the World Health Organization, exposure to second-hand smoke can have serious consequences on the health of people who have never smoked themselves, but who are exposed to other people's tobacco smoke.

"Our findings suggest that the deficits associated with second-hand smoke exposure extend to everyday cognitive function. We hope our work will stimulate further research in the field in order to gain a better understanding of the links between exposure to second-hand smoke, health problems and everyday cognitive function."

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Journal Reference:

1. T.M. Heffernan, T.S. O'Neill. Exposure to second-hand smoke damages everyday prospective memory. Addiction, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2012.04056.x

A study has uncovered a growing drink problem among older people and researchers are now urging the Government to review its UK health strategy to support society’s “invisible addicts”.

The University of Sunderland and Newcastle University, in collaboration with Age UK and South of Tyne and Wear PCT, have been assessing the extent of alcohol abuse among the older generation in the region which often results from big changes such as retirement, bereavement, feelings of boredom, loneliness and depression.

The news comes as Joan Bakewell, the Government’s former voice of older people investigates the problem and confronts her own social drinking habits for the BBC’s Panorama programme on Monday, September 10.

To date, little research has been carried out into the problem and its impact on drinkers or their families, as the effects are often less obvious, go unreported, and unlike younger drinkers, more older people drink in their own homes. It’s also an area which has received insufficient national attention through alcohol policies, which focus heavily on tackling the binge drinking culture or hazardous drinking in younger people.

Previous work by the study team has shown that even when clinicians have been encouraged to screen for excessive alcohol use, they often fail to deliver health-promoting advice to older people, while nurses report that they do not engage with them as they worry about depriving them of the social benefits of drinking.

Ann Crosland, Professor of Nursing at the University of Sunderland, one of the lead researchers, said: “An ageing population means that the number of older people with alcohol problems is inevitably on the increase.

“The need to establish an understanding for the problems faced by this generation has now become urgent. It would be a sad reflection on society if we just ignore this.”

The research team has been gathering data for the last two years through a review of literature, the mapping of current services and gathering the views and experiences of older people aged between 51 and 90. This has been done as part of the North East based Fuse* (The Centre for Translational Research in Public Health).

The team’s research area covered South of Tyne & Wear (Sunderland, South Tyneside and Gateshead); locations with a higher-than average older population, high levels of social and economic disadvantage, a strong industrial past and pockets of heavy drinking.

Their findings have now been presented to government ministers in a Public Service Review to highlight the issue. It’s hoped the review will eventually lead to service providers, such as GPs, routinely screening for drink problems in older people.

Of the 47 service providers included in the mapping process, only one reported that they specifically catered for the needs of older drinkers. Most were intended to be accessed for people over age 18, and most promotional material and alcohol services were specifically geared towards young people.

Professor Crosland said: “More information is needed to understand the patterns of drinking in later life and to establish the extent, nature and impact of hazardous drinking among older age groups.

“Service providers must start to consider the needs of older drinkers in their commissioning decisions. Drug and alcohol services also need to engage more effectively with this age group.”

General population data suggests that alcohol consumption among the British decreases with age, but that over 55s are more likely to be regular drinkers in this country than their European counterparts. Up to 23 per cent of men and eight per cent of women aged 60 and over drink more than the recommended weekly limits. Older women appear to be at particular risk because they are more likely to experience loss through bereavement, loss of good health leading to depression and loneliness.

Those who took part in the study deemed as low risk drinkers, associated alcohol with sociability, relaxation and forgetting their troubles. Many of those identified as problems drinkers, had mental health problems, drank at home in isolation, felt shame, and thought it was too late to change, with too few services able to help them.

Bereavement and lack of meaningful activity were reported as triggering an increase in their alcohol intake. But many revealed that their excessive drinking had started earlier in their lives and had carried on into old age.

John Briers, Chief Executive of Age UK South Tyneside said: “This research highlights what we have known for many years based on many of our service users who are isolated, depressed, bereaved and vulnerable. Alongside this research we have been delivering health promoting advice through a variety of community and domicilary based services. We are extremely grateful to South of Tyne and Wear PCT who commissioned this work after we raised with them some of our concerns. I would also like to thank colleagues in Age UK Gateshead and Age UK Sunderland who also assisted with this research.”       

Eileen Kaner, Professor of Public Health at Newcastle University said: “With our ageing population in the UK, it is clear that the number of older people with alcohol problems is rising. However, services often focus on younger drinkers and problem drug use as well as alcohol issues. This can be very off-putting for older people seeking advice or support about their drinking. In addition, many older people are not aware that alcohol might not be a good mix with other medication that they are taking. So there is a clear need for more discussion of these issues by health and social care practitioners.”

Reseachers involved in the study, who co-authored the public service review – ‘Alcohol Use In Later Life’ – included: Professor Ann Crosland, Dr Jonathan Ling and Karen Smith, from the University of Sunderland, and Dr Katie Lock, Dr Graeme Wilson and Professor Eileen Kaner, from Newcastle University.

Habituation refers to the ability of an organism to stop responding to repeated stimulation. A new study has examined the impact of maternal drinking on fetal habituation or learning abilities while still residing in the mother's womb. Results showed that those fetuses exposed to heavy binge drinking required significantly more trials to habituate, and also exhibited a greater variability in test performance.

While it has become clear that drinking during pregnancy can damage the fetal central nervous system, these outcomes can also be influenced by factors such as timing, type, amount, and duration of alcohol exposure. Furthermore, most studies of fetal neurobehavioral effects have been conducted during the postnatal period. This study is the first of its kind, examining alcohol's effects on fetal brain function — information processing and stability of performance — at the time of exposure to alcohol.

Results will be published in the December 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"When examined after birth, individuals who have been prenatally exposed to alcohol exhibit a wide range of behaviours that are indicative of central nervous system dysfunction," explained Peter G. Hepper, a professor of psychology at Queen's University of Belfast as well as corresponding author for the study. "These can include poorer abilities to learn, deficits in attention, poorer abilities to plan and organize, and an inability to learn about the consequences of actions. As a consequence, they may demonstrate behavioural difficulties and social problems which might lead to problems at school, and often 'trouble with the law.'"

"This study used a process of habituation, which is the ability of an organism to stop responding to repeated stimulation," explained Leo Leader, a senior lecturer in the School of Women's and Children's Health at the University of New South Wales. "This reflects the ability of the central nervous system to learn to recognize a particular stimulus. It is widely accepted that habituation represents a basic form of learning. Previous research has shown that the normal human fetus habituates, but habituation rates are altered if the fetus is exposed to reduced oxygen levels, maternal smoking, maternal sedatives, and impaired fetal growth."

"There have been no other studies looking at the habituation or learning abilities of the individual at the time they are being exposed to alcohol, that is, in their mother's womb," said Hepper. "Essentially, we played a loud two-second sound to the fetus via a speaker on the mother's abdomen. We watched using ultrasound whether the fetus moved, jumped or startled to the sound. The sound was repeated every five seconds and the response of the fetus recorded each time. As the sounds are repeated, the fetus's response got weaker and eventually, after a number of sound presentations, disappeared. At this point the fetus is said to have habituated."

Hepper and his colleagues examined 78 non-smoking mothers with normal, apparently healthy, single pregnancies from the Royal Jubilee Maternity Service in Belfast. Details of the mothers' alcohol consumption were obtained through questionnaires completed at 12 to 14 and 18 to 20 weeks gestation as well as semi-structured interviews at 34 weeks of gestation. Following identification of the mothers' drinking habits, five groups of fetuses were examined: control (n=30), moderate amounts consumed during the week (n=15), moderate amounts consumed during a binge period (n=13), heavy amounts consumed during the week (n=9), and heavy amounts consumed during a binge period (n=11). Fetal performance was examined on three occasions, seven days apart, beginning at 35 weeks of gestation.

"We have demonstrated that at the time of exposure, alcohol is affecting a fundamental psychological process known as habituation that underlies many of our more complex psychological abilities," said Hepper. "Habituation is a basic but high level psychological process that controls information flow in the brain. For example, when you enter a room for the first time you may be aware of the loud ticking of a clock. However, very quickly you will no longer 'hear' or pay attention to the ticking. The process of habituation has told the brain the ticking]is a non- threatening stimulus and switches attention to other things of merit. How good we are at this is a measure of how well we can process information. The quicker the habituation process, the better able individuals are to process information by turning off attention to irrelevant non-changing stimuli, and focusing attention and awareness on new potentially threatening stimuli."

"Results showed that the fetuses of mothers who binge drink five to 10 drinks per week, or drink more than 20 drinks a week drunk evenly, or as a binge over two to three days take significantly longer to habituate," added Leader. "The study also showed that binge drinking was associated with more variability of the fetus to learn. For normal learning and development, the fetal brain requires stability and this result implies that binge drinking impaired this function."

"One often ignored element of our brain function is its stability in functioning," agreed Hepper. "That is, our brain operates today the same as it did yesterday and will operate the same tomorrow. This is fundamental to our ability to exist and function in the world. Our study demonstrated that when exposed to alcohol there was increased variability in the brain's ability to habituate. The brain didn't perform the same. By observing these behavioural effects before birth, we can start to identify the areas of brain affected by alcohol and possibly develop treatments. Moreover, by identifying the presence of alcohol-induced problems before birth, it will be possible to implement better management strategies much earlier and hopefully improve outcomes."

Both Hepper and Leader noted that no safe level of alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been identified. "One 'oddity' of prenatal exposure to alcohol is there are large individual differences in its effects," said Hepper. "Some individuals whose mothers drink heavily may exhibit few effects whilst others whose mothers drink less may exhibit much greater effects. By observing the behaviour of the fetus it will be possible to ascertain which and by how much individuals have been affected by exposure to alcohol. To be safe, however, no drinking during pregnancy would be wise."

A new study finds that relatively early into tobacco addiction, teens experience many of the same negative psychological effects during abstinence as adults do, with a couple of exceptions. The data can inform efforts to improve the efficacy of quitting and withdrawal treatment programs.

Abstinence from smoking seems to affect teens differently than adults in a couple of ways, but a new study provides evidence that most of the psychological difficulties of quitting are as strong for relatively new, young smokers as they are for adults who have been smoking much longer.

"Adolescents are showing — even relatively early in the dependence process — significant, strong, negative effects just after acute abstinence from smoking," said L. Cinnamon Bidwell, assistant professor (research) in psychiatry and human behavior and the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. "Our study shows what those specific effects are. We chose a broad array" of factors to study.

Adolescents show significant, strong, negative effects when they abstain from smoking — even early in the dependence process.In controlled experiments, teens who abstained for nearly a day experienced withdrawal symptoms, smoking urges, exacerbations of negative mood, and higher provoked cravings at levels similar to those previously measured in abstaining adults, according to the study published online Sept. 4 in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. Teens who abstained did differ from adults on two measures however: They didn't become more irritated by certain test sounds and they didn't lose the capacity to still feel happy ("positive affect" in the study's parlance).

"In terms of the subjective negative reactions and the urge reactions, their patterns look remarkably similar to adults," said Suzanne Colby, associate professor (research) in psychiatry and human behavior and at the center. "That is really interesting because they are smoking fewer cigarettes per day and they've just been smokers for a shorter period of time."

To conduct the research, lead author Bidwell, senior author Colby, and their team measured a variety of psychological effects on 96 teens aged 13 to 19 in three experimental groups: 22 nonsmokers, 47 smokers whom they asked to abstain for almost a full day, and 27 smokers whom they allowed to continue smoking. On average the teen smokers coming into the study consumed about nine cigarettes a day and had been smoking for about two years.

The researchers made the psychological measurements using standardized methods at two sessions with each group. For the abstainers the first session occurred before abstention and the second occurred during it. The researchers measured the smokers' expired carbon monoxide levels in breath samples at the first session to establish a baseline and again at the second session to confirm whether abstinence, or continued smoking, had indeed occurred.

Confounding cravings

Among the team's findings was the surprising degree to which abstaining teens felt cravings even when presented with supposedly neutral cues. Their measured craving levels, even when "provoked" with cues as innocuous as a pencil and pad of paper, were about as high as when they were shown overt smoking cues, such as a lit cigarette of their favorite brand.

"They came in and their craving and negative affect were already high," Colby said.

What the researchers observed, therefore, was not that abstaining teens have an elevated level of craving when shown smoking cues versus neutral ones, but that their craving level is elevated almost regardless of experimental cues. But when the researchers compared abstainers to peers who either don't smoke at all, or who didn't have to stop smoking, the abstainers did exhibit a stronger "peak" reaction from smoking-specific cues than the other teens did.

Teen treatment

Ultimately, Bidwell and Colby hope the research will inform efforts to make smoking cessation and withdrawal treatment more effective for teens. Would it help, they ask, if treatment tried to mitigate these measurable difficulties of abstaining?

"Our findings point to withdrawal, urge (both un-cued and peak provoked), and negative affect (both un-cued and peak provoked) as candidate mediators for treatment efficacy in adolescents and suggest that future treatment trials should be designed to test mediation through these mechanisms," the authors wrote. "It remains unclear whether the lack of efficacy emerges because these treatments do not effectively reduce abstinence effects or, alternatively, because the theoretical approach is incorrect (e.g. these treatments are effective at reducing abstinence effects but reducing the negative effects abstinence does not improve cessation outcomes)."

But now researchers have a better understanding of what those negative effects of abstinence are for teens; most of those negative effects are just as intense for young, new smokers as for older, more experienced ones.

In addition to Bidwell and Colby, other authors are Jennifer Tidey and Linda Brazil of Brown, Raymond Niaura of Brown and The Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, and Adam Leventhal of the University of Southern California.

Scientists are reporting another reason — besides possible liver damage, stomach bleeding and other side effects — to avoid drinking alcohol while taking certain medicines. Their report in ACS' journal Molecular Pharmaceutics describes laboratory experiments in which alcohol made several medications up to three times more available to the body, effectively tripling the original dose.

 Ingesting the hormone oxytocin via nasal spray improves the ability to read people's facial expressions. These findings hold great promise for treatment of mental health disorders and drug addiction.