Estrogen May Trigger Binge Drinking, Prelim Study Suggests

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A woman’s binge drinking might be related to her hormones.

The female hormone estrogen appears to promote binge drinking in women, a new mouse study published recently in the journal Nature Communications shows.

Specifically, estrogen causes women to “pre-game,” or consume large quantities of alcohol within the first half-hour after it’s offered, results show.

This study provides what could be the first explanation for sex-related differences in binge drinking, said senior researcher Kristen Pleil, an assistant professor of pharmacology with Weill Cornell Medicine.

“Estrogen has such powerful effects on so many behaviors, particularly in females,” Pleil said in a university news release. “So, it makes sense that it would also modulate drinking.”

During the pandemic lockdown, women increased their heavy alcohol consumption more than men, recent studies have shown.

On top of that, women have more alcohol-related hospital visits than men.

For this study, researchers served alcohol to lab mice while they tracked the rodents’ estrogen levels.

They found that when a female mouse had high blood levels of estrogen, she drank more than on days when her estrogen was low.

Further, this binge drinking was linked to heightened activity in a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which had been previously linked to drinking behavior, researchers added.

“When a female takes her first sip from the bottle containing alcohol, those neurons go crazy,” Pleil said. “And if she’s in a high-estrogen state, they go even crazier.”

That extra boost of neural activity means the mice hit the bottle even harder, particularly within the first 30 minutes after the alcohol was made available, researchers found.

The team also noted that estrogen directly excites these neurons — a surprising revelation, given that the hormone typically influences behavior through an hours-long process of altering gene activity rather than targeting brain cells.

“We believe this is the first time that anybody has shown that…estrogen made by the ovaries can use such a rapid mechanism to control behavior,” Pleil said.

Researchers plan to examine whether the same system might regulate drinking in men.

“All of the infrastructure is there in males, too: the estrogen receptors and the basic circuit organization,” Pleil added.

The only difference is the source of the estrogen, researchers explained in background notes. Estrogen in males is created by converting the male hormone testosterone into the female hormone.

These results also could point a way to treating binge drinking, by inhibiting either estrogen levels or the effect of estrogen on brain cells, researchers added.

More information

The National Institutes of Health has more on binge drinking.

SOURCE: Weill Cornell Medicine, news release, Dec. 30, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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