Does Alcohol Kill Brain Cells? How Alcohol Affects Your Brain

Alcohol is a neurotoxin that can affect your brain cells directly and indirectly. It enters your bloodstream immediately and reaches your brain within five minutes of drinking it. And it typically takes only 10 minutes to start feeling some of the effects.
It’s first big effect is triggering the release of endorphins. These feel-good hormones are the reason light-to-moderate drinkers feel more relaxed, sociable, and happy when drinking.
Heavy or binge drinking, on the other hand, can also interfere with your brain’s communication pathways and affect how your brain processes information.
In the short-term, you can expect:
changes in your mood and behavior
difficulty concentrating
poor coordination
slurred speech
confusion
Alcohol poisoning
Alcohol poisoning can happen when you drink a lot of alcohol in a short period. This can cause the alcohol in your bloodstream to interfere with parts of your brain that are responsible for basic life support functions, such as:
Drinking can have long-term effects on your brain, including decreased cognitive function and memory issues.
Brain atrophy
Researchers have long known that brain atrophy — or shrinkage — is common among heavy drinkers. But a 2017 study found that even moderate drinking can have similar effects.
Drinking causes shrinkage in the hippocampus, which is the area of your brain that’s associated with memory and reasoning. The amount of shrinkage appears to be directly related to how much a person drinks.
Results of the study showed that people who drank the equivalent of four drinks a day had almost six times the shrinkage as nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers had three times the risk of shrinkage than nondrinkers.
Neurogenesis issues
Even though alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, it can negatively impact them long-term. For starters, too much alcohol can interfere with neurogenesis, which is your body’s ability to make new brain cells.
Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome
Heavy drinking can also lead to a thiamine deficiency, which can cause a neurological disorder called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. The syndrome — not the alcohol — results in a loss of neurons in the brain, causing confusion, memory loss, and loss of muscle coordination.
Is the damage reversible?
While the long-term effects of alcohol on the brain can be quite serious, most of them of the damage is reversible is you stop drinking. Even brain atrophy can start to reverse after a few weeks of avoiding alcohol.
While FASDs aren’t reversible, early intervention can help improve a child’s development.
In minors
During the adolescent and teen years, the brain continues to develop and mature. This continues until the early twenties.
Alcohol use in minors has been linked to significant shrinkage of the hippocampus and smaller prefrontal lobes than people of the same age that don’t drink.
The prefrontal lobe is the part of the brain that undergoes the most change during the teen years and is responsible for judgment, planning, decision making, language, and impulse control. Drinking during this time can affect all of these functions and impair memory and learning.
Alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, but it does have both short- and long-term effects on your brain, even in moderate amounts. Going out for happy hour a few nights a month likely won’t cause any long-term damage. But if you find yourself drinking heavily or binge drinking often, consider reaching out for help.
Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a freelance writer and author who has written extensively on all things health and lifestyle for more than a decade. When she’s not holed-up in her writing shed researching an article or off interviewing health professionals, she can be found frolicking around her beach town with husband and dogs in tow or splashing about the lake trying to master the stand-up paddle board.
Last medically reviewed on September 17, 2019
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