Electrophysiological abnormalities in episodic memory associated with heavy alcohol consumption in young university students.

Binge drinking (BD) is a pattern of intermittent alcohol consumption concentrated in sessions of a
few hours, with high prevalence among young people and adolescents. BD has been shown to be more
harmful in the adolescent (than in the adult brain), as it is still maturing and therefore more vulnerable
to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol.
The objective of this study was to evaluate electrophysiological anomalies in episodic declarative
memory, during encoding process and retrieval process, in young university students (18 years) with a
BD pattern. Two years after the first evaluation, participants were invited again for a follow-up.
Currently, there are no studies investigating episodic memory processes using event related potentials
(ERPs) with a longitudinal approach.
ERP recordings were carried out during the performance of two episodic memory tasks:
Linguistic Memory Task and Faces-Names Memory Task. Participants had to memorize pairs of items
(word-word vs. face-name), and during retrieval phase one member of the pair (word vs. face) was
presented and they were asked to remember the associated item.
The results showed electrophysiological anomalies in some components of ERPs associated to
memory encoding of faces-names pairs and word pairs, as well as in early components related to
perception of faces. In relation to retrieval process, anomalies were detected during retrieval of word
pairs, and some components presented a different pattern of affectation between men and women with
a BD pattern. Some anomalies detected during encoding and retrieval processes persisted after two
years in those participants who maintained a BD pattern of consumption; others anomalies were not
presented.