What leads addiction leads to: the brain, liver are destroyed, the likelihood of developing cardiovascular and oncological diseases increases, etc. But this does not happen immediately. How long does the negative effect of alcohol last?
After prolonged abuse of alcoholic beverages, the destructive effect does not immediately disappear, scientists say. In Germany, only 3% of the adult population do not drink them. In other countries, this percentage will be approximately the same. At the same time, not everyone knows how serious the consequences of alcohol addiction.
International experts, including German scientists from ZI – Central Institute for Mental Health (Mannheim) conducted a comprehensive study of the issue. For a while, they observed a group of 91 alcoholic people who stopped drinking fortified drinks.
First of all, scientists were interested in how quickly the damaged brain of the volunteers would recover without alcohol. The results of MRI showed that the white matter of the brain was destroyed even 6 weeks after it was abandoned. And the nervous system was damaged even more than before the experiment, as the inflammatory processes began to progress.
To confirm that the changes were not related to smoking, nutrition, or anything other than alcohol, the researchers performed a similar experiment on rats. The results were the same: MRI confirmed the continuation of degenerative changes after the rodents stopped receiving a dose of alcohol. It has also been observed that alcohol has a stronger negative effect on the brain than was commonly believed.
This forces experts to strongly recommend that everyone who drinks alcoholic beverages at least occasionally should do so as little as possible.
