Heavy alcohol consumption in young college students: A follow-up study using structural neuroimaging.

Binge drinking (BD) is defined as a pattern of intensive and intermittent drinking which leads to a blood alcohol concentration of at least 0.08 g/dL in a short period of time. BD is highly prevalent among university students and has been associated with several neuropsychological, neurostructural and neurofunctional anomalies. To provide a comprehensive view of the effects of the BD pattern on the architecture and functioning of the adolescent brain, in this thesis, firstly, a systematic review of neuroimaging studies was performed. This review identified some brain regions as specific targets where the abnormalities observed in young and adolescent binge drinkers converge more consistently. In addition, this work revealed the scarcity of longitudinal studies that allow determining the medium/long-term impact of BD. On this basis, in the present thesis, secondly, a structural magnetic resonance study was carried out to characterize the consequences of maintaining a BD pattern on three grey matter features (i.e. cortical thickness, surface area and volume). The final sample included youth with and without BD who were initially assessed at the age of 18-19 years and after a period of 2 years, when they were 20-21 years old. The results revealed that binge drinkers who maintained a stable trajectory of BD consumption during the follow-up, compared to controls, presented neurostructural alterations in different cortical (i.e. left insula, right rostral middle
frontal gyrus) and subcortical (i.e. right nucleus accumbens) regions closely involved in executive functions, emotional regulation and reward processing. Furthermore, some of these abnormalities were sex-dependent and may reflect a differential effect of the BD pattern on normative neuromaturation processes.
Keywords: Binge drinking, emerging adulthood, structural magnetic resonance, longitudinal.