It is estimated that one in 1,000 babies in the U.S. is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, characterized by mental and growth retardation, malformations of the brain and face, and behavioral disorders.
Alcohol abuse can also lead to neurological disorders in adults, disrupting memory and learning.
Yet for such a widely used drug, relatively little is known about how alcohol damages the brain. Until a decade ago, scientists thought that it dissolved into the lipids of nerve cell membranes and non-specifically disrupted protein function. However, an increasing amount of research is showing that alcohol, like more potent drugs such as Valium and morphine, reacts in very specific ways with cell receptors to cause intoxication, addiction, cell death, and abnormal development. Michael Wilkemeyer, HMS instructor in neurology, and Michael Charness, HMS associate professor of neurology, director of the Alcohol Research Laboratory, and chief of neurology at the VA Boston Healthcare System, are leading research into how alcohol's effects on cell adhesion may be responsible for disrupting brain development. A paper published in the March 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that alcohols like ethanol have a surprisingly specific interaction with the cell adhesion molecule L1, an interaction that can actually be blocked by alcohols of a different size or shape.