Is it true that alcohol kills brain cells?

We have all seen how when someone is drunk something happens in the brain. They stumble, talk trash, lose control of their emotions, and forget things.

Some people have tried to explain this behavior as a consequence of the death of neurons, however the researcher Roberta Pentney ensure that this does not happen. Fortunately, when we drink alcoholic beverages, the body does not allow all the ethanol to harm our body. The liver It is in charge of processing it and converting it into a less toxic substance. However, the liver does not work fast enough to process five beer bottles in half an hour, when this happens, the excess alcohol circulates through the blood until it reaches the brain.

Perceptible mental decline in alcoholics has little to do with that long-standing urban legend. To kill any type of cell, you need very high concentrations of alcohol –close to 100%–, and we start to get drunk from a blood level of 0.1%.

Alcohol rather affects the neuronal connections of the cerebellum, an area on which learning and motor coordination depend. But, as can be seen in the autopsies, the brains of abstainers and bottle addicts have the same number of neurons. It is their quality, not quantity, that suffers from binge drinking.

Font: Very interesting