Heavy drinking can change your DNA

-
Image result for Heavy drinking can change your DNAAre you a heavy drinker? Take note. Besides alcohol taking a toll on your health in many ways, it may also trigger a long-lasting genetic change resulting in an even greater craving for alcohol.


“We found that people who drink heavily may be changing their DNA in a way that makes them crave alcohol even more,” said Dipak K Sarkar, professor at Rutgers University in the US. “This may help explain why alcoholism is such a powerful addiction, and may one day contribute to new ways to treat alcoholism or help prevent at-risk people from becoming addicted.”

Image result for Heavy drinking can change your DNA
For the study, researchers focused on two genes implicated in the control of drinking behaviour: PER2, which influences the body’s biological clock, and POMC, which regulates our stress-response system. By comparing groups of moderate, binge and heavy drinkers, the team found that the two genes had changed in binge and heavy drinkers through an alcohol-influenced gene modification process called methylation. In addition, the binge and heavy drinkers also showed reductions in gene expression, or the rate at which these genes create proteins. These changes increased with greater alcohol intake.

Comments

Post a Comment

Please comment on this blog-

Popular posts from this blog

E-bandage generates electricity, speeds wound healing in rats

-
Image
                                                                                                                                                       A wound covered by an electric bandage on a rat's skin (top left) healed faster than a wound under a control bandage (right). Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing time for skin wounds in ...
Read more

Fathers Are Happier Than Mothers, Study Shows — And Here's Why

-
Image
The third study compared fathers to mothers and their level of happiness while caring for their children. Fathers, it seems, are more likely to be happy while caring for their children than mothers. A 2019 study out of the University of California Riverside, highlights one more aspect in the divide between fathers and mothers, and more broadly, men and women. The research, a meta-analysis of three different studies, looked at the emotional health of 18,000 people and compared traits like well-being, happiness, episodes of depression, and stress. The first two studies within the research compared parents to childless people and found that fathers are happier than their child-free peers. The reason? Dads, more often than moms, report playing with their children while providing care. Now, let's unpack this a bit. We can assume, that of the 18,000 couples who took part in this research, many split household chores equally. But over recent years, much light has...
Read more

Your friends shape your microbiome — and so do their friends

-
Image
Analysis of nearly 2,000 people living in remote villages in Honduras reveals who’s spreading gut microorganisms to whom. Friends share more than just food when they dine together.Credit: Getty A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study1 shows. The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies2 that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora. In the quest to understand what shapes a person’s microbiome, social interactions are “definitely a piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing until rec...
Read more