If you drink alcohol, you may be able to identify certain places you frequent that instantly make you crave a drink. Maybe your cravings start up the moment you walk into a ball game, or your favorite restaurant or a nostalgic bar, and your brain starts replaying memories of all the good times you’ve had with friends and family members in that very spot. According to a recent study, these drinking-related memories can be very powerful. So powerful in fact, that they can actually cause you to crave alcohol.
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Gabor Egervari, Ph.D., and his team found that alcohol plays a role in memory formation, on a cellular level. The study, published in the journal Nature, showed that alcohol is able to trigger cellular pathways that influence the way the brain encodes memories. The biggest influence comes from the way alcohol is broken down by the body. Researchers determined that the breakdown triggers effects in the brain that depend on two different factors. The first is the body’s supply of alcohol-related chemicals. The second is the activity of a key enzyme in the brain.
As you drink, your body breaks down alcohol in the liver, where it turns into chemicals called metabolites. One such metabolite, known as acetate, quickly appears in the bloodstream and travels to the brain, where it heads for cells located in the part of the brain most associated with memory – the hippocampus. Once inside the cells in the hippocampus, acetate is then transported by a key enzyme known as ACSS2. This enzyme plays a crucial role in long-term spatial memory.
While these changes may sound small, they’re significant enough to alter the formation of memories related to alcohol. Egervari explained, “These memories encode stimuli from the drinking environment that become associated with experiencing alcohol reward. Later exposure to these memories can trigger intense craving and relapse.”
Egervari and his team hypothesized that ACSS2 may be the key to curbing alcohol cravings, considering the role it plays in alcohol-related memories. However, they say research on that topic has yet to be completed.