Besides other harmful effects of heavy drinking that includes car accidents and domestic violence, the researchers in US have found that it also makes recovery from the trauma slower.
"There's a whole spectrum to how people react to a traumatic event," study author Thomas Kash, assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine has been quoted saying.
"Its the recovery that we're looking at - the ability to say 'this is not dangerous anymore'. Basically, our research shows that chronic exposure to alcohol can cause a deficit with regard to how our cognitive brain centres control our emotional brain centres," Kash has been reported saying in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"A history of heavy alcohol abuse could impair a critical mechanism for recovering from a trauma, and in doing so put people at greater risk for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and alcohol abuse," National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) scientist Andrew Holmes, who conducted the study with Kash, according to a North Carolina statement, said.
As a part of the study that took a month to complete, the researchers gave one group of mice doses of alcohol equivalent to double the legal driving limit in humans. A second group of mice was administered with no alcohol. The team then used mild electric shocks to train all the mice to fear the sound of a brief tone.
Later researchers played the tone repeatedly and observed that the mice that were not given alcohol slowly stopped fearing the tone.
The mice administered with alcohol, on the other hand, froze in place each time the tone was played, even long after the electric shocks had stopped.
The researchers found this pattern akin to the patients with PTSD, who have trouble overcoming fear even when they are no longer in a dangerous situation. The PTSD is a debilitating condition initiated due to a terrifying event. Generally its victims have incessant frightening thoughts and memories of their ordeal and feel emotionally numb.
--with IANS inputs
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