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Drug use can damage the brain and lead to addiction
Tina Hesman Saey | STLToday.com | 04/01/2006


Teenagers who drink, smoke and use drugs can derail their brain development and set themselves up for lifelong addiction.

And parents who strictly monitor their teens' behavior are one of the most influential forces preventing kids from using drugs and alcohol.

Now that might not sound like news to you.

But truth is, until recently most of what science has known about addiction in teenagers has been extrapolated from research in adults. Now, new brain-imaging studies have shown that the teenage brain is a rapidly-changing organ and doesn't work the way an adult brain does. Researchers now believe that drugs and alcohol can disrupt that massive renovation of the brain during adolescence, making it more vulnerable to drugs and easier for teens to get addicted.

And scientists say that an addiction that starts early in life is harder to kick than one that starts later. Nearly half of kids who are regular drinkers before age 14 will become alcoholics, said Dr. Danielle Dick, a clinical psychologist and geneticist at Washington University. That puts early drinkers at three times greater risk of alcohol addiction than people who wait until age 21 to start drinking, she said.

Percy Menzies, director of the Assisted Recovery Centers of America, an addiction treatment center in St. Louis, says that "When people come to us and say they started drinking as teenagers, we know we have our work cut out."

Epidemiological studies have shown that most addictions start in adolescence, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And when a teenager's pleasure-chemical systems aren't fully developed and then get wired to depend on substances for feeling good, the normal flow of brain chemicals that aid in learning, decision making and other key processes are often blocked, Volkow said.

Parents are the key

In adults, genetics are more than 50 percent responsible for addiction to alcohol. So people have long assumed that genes are the biggest reason kids drink, too.

But new studies of twins in Finland and Missouri showed no evidence that genetics contributed to alcohol-dependence in 14-year-olds, Dick said.

Instead, Dick said, parental monitoring is one of the most consistent predictors of whether teens start using alcohol and other drugs.

And that means more than just having a good relationship with your kids. A good, warm relationship doesn't mean kids are going to tell parents what they are doing, or with whom.

"Parents might say, 'Oh, if they were doing that, they'd tell me,' but the reality is, they probably won't," Dick said. What works is knowing where children are, who they are with and what they are doing. Children with the highest level of parental monitoring were less likely to start drinking or using drugs, Dick said.

For an addiction to take hold, kids must be exposed to addictive substances. So young adolescents who never have a chance to smoke or drink avoid stirring up a genetic predisposition to addiction. In a more permissive environment, genes may rear their heads.

Once teens start to drink or use drugs, the consequences turn severe. Recent studies show that teens who start using marijuana before they turn 17 are at higher risk of developing schizophrenia than people who didn't use or started smoking marijuana later in adolescence or young adulthood.

Marijuana has often been called a gateway drug, a substance that can lead to use of more harmful drugs. Most researchers agree that marijuana doesn't necessarily set up the brain for further addictions, but does give kids practice in obtaining illicit substances and access to a subculture where harder drugs are available.

The real gateway drug may be nicotine, experts say. Most kids try cigarettes before other drugs.

Researchers compared sets of identical twins in which one twin started smoking before age 17 and the other twin smoked later. Twins who started smoking before age 17 became addicted to other substances, such as alcohol or other drugs, more readily than their twins who waited, Volkow said. Because identical twins have the same genetic make-up, the addiction of early-smoking twins can't be chalked up to genetic susceptibility alone, she said.

Cigarette smoking also can disrupt memory and attention, said Dr. Leslie Jacobsen, a psychiatrist at Yale University. But withdrawal from cigarettes is also bad, she said.

"Once you're dependent, you're always confronted with a certain amount of nicotine withdrawal," she said.

"Children get addicted to smoking more quickly than they expect, and many aren't even aware that they are dependent," she said.

Brain is at risk

Even teens who just binge drink on weekends can hurt their brains, said Susan F. Tapert, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. Her measurements of a seahorse-shaped part of the brain, called the hippocampus, revealed that drinkers had shrunken hippocampuses compared with teens who don't drink. That is important because the hippocampus is one of the regions of the brain most responsible for learning and memory.

Tapert doesn't see the same dramatic change in the hippocampus of marijuana smokers.

But that may not matter, Jacobsen said.

"It's not just how the brain looks, but how it works that's important," she said.

Teens who smoke marijuana - even those who have stopped using for a month - need to expend much more mental energy to do simple tasks, Tapert said.

For instance, marijuana smokers retain 5 percent to 10 percent less information when listening to a story. That difference may not seem big, but could make the difference between passing or failing a test in school.

A University of Missouri study of college-age students showed that chronic binge drinkers make bad decisions in other parts of life. Researchers at the Midwest Alcoholism Research Center in Columbia tested 19 and 20-year-olds on a decision-making task involving gambling risks. People who were chronic binge drinkers more often made decisions that would put them at high risk for losing money, said Kenneth J. Sher, director of the center.

The binge drinkers weren't more impulsive or thrill-seeking than their non-drinking counterparts and they scored similarly on the ACT college entrance exam. But bad decision making on the gambling test was also associated with making unwise decisions about drinking in life. The heaviest drinkers had their first full drink at age 13, and were bingeing on almost 18 drinks per week by the fall of the their freshman year in college.

The researchers don't know whether the students are heavy binge drinkers because they are bad at decision-making or if the alcohol impairs their ability to make good decisions, Sher said.

Either way, students get set in their ways earlier than many parents realize, he said.

"Most drinking patterns are set before they get to college," Sher said.

Parents unwittingly give young teens access to alcohol. Few parents think to lock up their liquor cabinets, Sher said.

"I think parents are clueless," he said. And many have a strong case of denial. "They don't think their kids would ever drink."

The concern that some parents have about being hypocritical when telling their kids not to smoke, drink or use marijuana is misplaced in light of the data on how drugs affect young brains, Volkow said.

Parents often don't realize that the weed their children are smoking is far more powerful than the herb kids smoked a decade ago, Volkow said. The concentration of THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) the main active chemical in marijuana, has risen from 2 percent of the active ingredients to 14 percent, she said.

As grim as the picture is for teens who use drugs, tobacco or alcohol, there is some good news. Because the teen brain is still developing, it may be able to recover from the harm of substance use if teens clean up their acts.

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Buzzby

Amongst all the BS there's a good argument for legalization. The fact that tobacco and alcohol are legal but restricted from sale to teenagers doesn't stop them from getting these drugs, but at least they don't lead people into the black market where other dangerous drugs are readily available.

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slangking

Correlation =/= causation. Something tells me (and it seems like much more simple theory than one which brings in genetics) that the twin who was smoking cigs before 17 was also probably hanging out with a shadier crew of people and hence put in a more susceptible social situation for other drugs.

This is not a scientific argument. It is what we call an "ipse dixit" argument in a college philosophy class -- an argument that is compelling to an audience because an expert is giving it, not because it is grounded in reason, empirical fact, and logical deduction. BS to the max.

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I took a bath this morning in six war speeches, and a sprinkle of peace. Looks like ever body is declaring war against the forces of force. That's what you get for building up a big war machine. It scares your neighbors into jumping on you, and then of course they them selves have to use force, so you are against their force, and they're aginst yours. Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring. The fuse is lit and the cannon is set, and somebody is in for a frailin. - Woody Guthrie

smoking joe

I knew it, I knew it. I'm an addict hooked on pot.
That explains why I like rough sex with the wife then. It's the pot making me a sex devil.

Sec

This is the first I have read indicating that anything other than marijuana to be a "gateway" drug. I do agree with that statement.

.

Most, probably all identical twins have the same friends. They have the same genetic makeup so their preferences as far as likes and dislikes should be relatively the same. They don't usually hang out with different types of crowds. The person that the twin who started smoking hung out with most often was the other twin. Unles that twin was "a shadier crew of people", your theory is a bit too simple.

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bobmarleyfan

That they're reading a bunch of bullshit.

Toking Jedi

That's because they were sheltered and got lucky. What works is when the subject of drugs is approached early on, and framed in a way so that the kid knows what actually goes on. The "don't do drugs; they're bad" argument doesn't work so well when the kids become, say, my age (hey, it didn't work for me; my mom's explanation of a drug high was that it "gives them an 'up' feeling." Right, that's real great, Mom, thanks). However, parents who tell their kids that drugs are something only for adults to use, and, like my parents, give them tiny sips of their wine to taste, will do a better job of steering them away from the wrong crowds.

So you're saying that you judge a change in the brain by how it looks? You're saying that you don't "see" the same disruption of memory in marijuana smokers, and then you go on to give a piece of information that has no reference. How are we supposed to find out how the study was done? Give us that, and then we might listen to you.


I would think that with all the data on alcohol's psychological and physiological effects on the brain, you'd be able to figure that out. The frontal lobe, according to this chart (http://www.dupageco.org/coroner/stats/alcohol.pdf), is affected by a mere 0.01-0.10% BAC, and among the effects are weakness of willpower, increased confidence, and altered judgement. And as we know, some of alcohol's effects last even after you're "back to normal", so I would only assume that they have poor decision-making abilities because they are BINGE DRINKERS.

Here we go again. Average THC content hasn't risen all that much, and even if it had, and let's say this in unison: WE'D ALL BE SMOKING MUCH LESS!

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Mamabudz

...sorry ...sounds likea perfectly normal eerotic power exchange, as long as both partners enjoy it...going to have to find something esle to blame than pot.

TheNewGuy

Nope. Many twins are very close-knit, but just because thier genes are the same doesn't mean they will be effected the same way by thier environment. If one hangs out with crowd A, and the other hangs out with crowd B, they'll end up pretty different. For twins to have the same taste in everything they would have to hang out with eachother 24/7, have the same exact experiences, see and talk to the same people, etc, and they still wouldn't necessarily have similar tastes.

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