All of us have encountered attention-grabbing headlines such as "You may be boozing your brain cells away," but many of us don't accept that claim in stark, literal terms. Similarly, evidence in rodents that single, high oral doses of ethanol can be significantly neurotoxic, are often dismissed as "well rats are not people." It may be time to change our minds. Hua et al. (2020) now show us for the first time, in a highly original and well-conceived experiment, persuasive evidence for persisting structural brain alterations consequent on a single extreme drinking episode.
Binges, Brains, Birthdays, and BACs