British and Chinese researchers identify the origins of alcohol

The physical origin of alcohol addiction is found in a network of the human brain that controls our response to danger, according to a team of British and Chinese researchers, co-led by the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and Fudan University in Shanghai.

The medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) in front of the brain senses an unpleasant or distressing position, and then transmits this information to dorsal periaqueductal gray matter (dPAG) at the heart of the brain, the last area that processing whether we need to escape the situation.

An individual is at greater risk of developing alcohol use disorders when this information pathway is balanced in the following two ways:

• Alcohol inhibits the dPAG (the area of ​​the brain that processes adverse conditions), so that the brain is unable to respond to negative signals, or the need to escape danger – causing a person feels the benefits of drinking alcohol, and not the harmful side effects. This is a possible cause of compulsive drinking.
• A person with an alcohol addiction usually has a predisposed dPAG, makes them feel like they are in a bad or unpleasant situation that they want to escape, and turns to alcohol for doing so. This is the cause of emergency drinking.

I was asked to comment on a previous study of mice for the same reason: to find out where alcohol abuse can cause. It is encouraging that we can reproduce these murine models in humans, and, of course, go a step further to identify a two-way model that links alcohol misuse to a tendency to be showing disrespectful behavior. “

Jianfeng Feng, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Professor, Fudan University

Professor Trevor Robbins from the Department of Psychology at Cambridge University, said: “It is remarkable that these cloud systems in the mouse have been shown to be involved in responding to threat and punishment relevant to understanding. We have a look at the factors that lead to alcohol misuse in adolescents. “

Dr Tianye Jia from the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Psychology at Fudan University, also affiliated with King’s College London, says
“We have found that the same neural regulation above may work in two completely different ways, but which may lead to alcohol abuse behavior.”

Published in journal Advances in science, the research is led by international collaboration, co-led by Dr. Tianye Jia of Fudan University, Professor Jianfeng Feng of the University of Warwick and the University of Fudan, and Prof. professor Trevor Robbins from Cambridge University and Fudan University.

The research team had noted that previous rodent models showed that the mPFC and dPAG brain domains could underlie alcohol dependence.
They then analyzed MRI brain scans from the IMAGEN dataset – a group of 2000 people from the UK, Germany, France and Ireland who take part in scientific research to advance knowledge of how ‘biological, psychological and environmental factors during adolescence may affect brain and mental development. Cheers.

Participants undertook action-based MRI scans, and when they did not receive rewards in the actions (which resulted in negative feelings of punishment), regulation between the mOFC and dPAG was blocked higher in participants who had exhibited alcohol abuse.

Similarly, in a state of rest, participants who showed a more focused regulatory pathway between the mOFC and dPAG, (leading to feelings of urgency to escape a situation), were also on levels higher alcohol abuse.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is one of the most common and serious mental illnesses. According to a WHO report in 2018, more than 3 million deaths each year are related to alcohol use worldwide, and harmful alcohol use contributes 5.1% of the global burden of disease. Understanding how alcohol forms in the human brain may lead to more effective interventions to address the global problem of alcohol misuse.