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A Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center team studying alcohol addiction has new research that might shed light on why some drinkers are more susceptible to addiction than others.

Jeff Weiner, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist, and colleagues used an animal model to look at the early stages of the addiction process and focused on how individual animals responded to alcohol. Their findings may lead not only to a better understanding of addiction, but to the development of better drugs to treat the disease as well, Weiner said.

"We know that some people are much more vulnerable to alcoholism than others, just like some people have a vulnerability to cancer or heart disease," Weiner said. "We don’t have a good understanding of what causes this vulnerability, and that’s a big question. But if we can figure it out, we may be able to better identify people at risk, as well as gain important clues to help develop better drugs to treat the disease."

Full story of alcohol addiction at Science Daily

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

Moderate intoxication may help a person notice minor changes in a visual scene, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found. During tests of "change blindness," the inability to notice minor changes, intoxicated participants detected as many changes as sober subjects and with shorter response times.

"Both the sober and drunk people find the same number of changes, but drunk people find them faster," says Jennifer Wiley, professor of psychology at UIC and senior author on the study.

Two experiments comprised the new study, which was published online in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

First, 48 males were given a baseline task-set to make sure the drinking and non-drinking groups were equal at the outset.

Full story of drinking and response times at Science Daily

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

Energy drinks can be dangerous for teenagers, according to a new report published in a pediatrics journal. The drinks are particularly dangerous when they are combined with alcohol, CBS News reports. The drinks can cause rapid heartbeat, insomnia, high blood pressure, anxiety and obesity, researchers write in Pediatrics in Review.

“They contain too much caffeine and other additives that we don’t know enough about. Healthy eating, exercise and adequate sleep are better ways to get energy,” said lead author Dr. Kwabena Blankson, a U.S. Air Force major and an adolescent medicine specialist at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Many teens are not aware that mixing alcohol and energy drinks can make them feel less drunk than they actually are, the researchers noted. They wrote that drinking just one caffeinated beverage mixed with alcohol can be equivalent to drinking a bottle of wine and several cups of coffee. A 16-ounce energy drink has about 160 milligrams of caffeine, compared with 100 milligrams for an average cup of coffee.

Full story of energy drinks and alcohol at DrugFree.org

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case Wednesday on the question of whether police must obtain a warrant before forcing suspected drunk drivers to submit to a blood alcohol test. State supreme courts are divided on whether these forced tests violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects again unreasonable searches and seizures, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

The case centers on Tyler McNeely, who was pulled over for speeding by a Missouri highway patrolman, and was taken to a hospital. About 25 minutes after McNeely was pulled over, a technician measured his blood-alcohol content at 0.154 percent, nearly twice the legal limit.

The Missouri police in the case argued they should not have to wait for approval to give a blood test, because alcohol dissipates quickly in the bloodstream. Last year, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected that argument. It ruled the blood test violated the Fourth Amendment. The court found there were no special circumstances to justify obtaining the blood test so quickly. State high courts in Iowa and Utah also have made similar rulings.

Full story of forced blood alcohol tests at DrugFree.org

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

Researchers from the HealthyFit group at the University of Vigo have studied university students’ lifestyles; their analysis, which includes alcohol and illegal drug consumption habits, sport and food, concludes that most students indulge in unhealthy behavior. One of the main results of the study points to the high consumption of alcohol.

"The amount drunk per unit of time is higher among women. In other words, even though male students drink more often, females do so more intensively in shorter periods of time, which is known as binge drinking," explained José Mª Cancela Carral, co-author of the study published by the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Researchers randomly selected 985 students from different degree courses and in different years at the University of Vigo.

Of the females interviewed, 51.2% lead a sedentary lifestyle, while the percentage in males is 41.7%. When analyzing students who maintain an appropriate level of physical activity, 38.6% of males do physical exercise, as opposed to only 20.9% of women.

Full story of female students drinking at Science Daily

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education