Low‐level alcohol consumption during adolescence and its impact on cognitive control development

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical period for maturation of cognitive control and most adolescents start experimenting with alcohol around that time. On the one hand, recent studies indicate that low control abilities predict future problematic alcohol use. On the other hand, binge drinking during young adulthood can (further) impair cognitive control. However, so far no study examined the effects of low-level alcohol use during adolescence. In the present longitudinal fMRI study, we therefore investigated the development of cognitive control in a community-based sample of 92 adolescents at ages 14, 16 and 18. Two different cognitive control functions, i.e. inhibition of pre-potent responses (operationalized by incongruence effects) and switching between different task sets, were measured within one task. Alcohol use in our sample was low (mean: 54 g/week at age 18). The study revealed that neither behavioural nor neural measures of cognitive control function at age 14 predicted alcohol use at age 18 but confirmed established predictors such as gender and personality. As expected, from age 14 to 18, cognitive control abilities were improving (decreased reaction times and/or errors), and activation of cognitive control networks (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and pre-supplementary motor area) during incongruent trials increased. Unexpectedly, higher alcohol consumption during adolescence was associated with a more pronounced increase in cognitive performance and a smaller increase of neural activation when incongruent trials afforded inhibitory control. We conclude that low-level alcohol use during adolescence does not severely impair ongoing maturation of cognitive control abilities and networks.

Addressing the reliability fallacy in fMRI: Similar group effects may arise from unreliable individual effects

“…The copyright holder for this preprint (which was this version posted November 7, 2017. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/215053 doi: bioRxiv preprint Individual reliability of fMRI 6 November 7, 2017 to examine the influence of substance consumption on brain development (for details see Jurk, Mennigen, Goschke, & Smolka, 2016;Ripke et al, 2012Ripke et al, , 2014Rodehacke et al, 2014;Vetter et al, 2015). Recently, we investigated the reliability of selected fMRI contrasts for the first two acquisition waves (Vetter et al, 2017).…”

Effect of alcohol use on the adolescent brain and behavior

“…A study using eight years of data from 2,226 youth in the Tracking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) found that light and heavy adolescent alcohol use was not associated with deterioration in executive functioning, compared to no alcohol use, when controlling for baseline performance, age, and tobacco use (55). A four-year study of 92 adolescents found low alcohol consumption was associated with subtle improvements in inhibitory control (56). No negative effect of low-level alcohol use on the development of school grades, spatial working memory or rapid visual processing was found.…”

Behavioral and Cerebral Impairments Associated with Binge Drinking in Youth: A Critical Review

“…Some studies have also supported the inverse relationship and have proposed that the impairments observed in binge drinkers are the direct consequence of alcohol consumption. One study that targeted adolescent low drinkers indicated that alcohol consumption 4 years later (mean = 54 g per week at follow-up when participants were 18 years old) was not predicted by cognitive performance (inhibitory control and shifting) or brain activation (Jurk et al, 2016), suggesting that both cognitive impairments and brain modifications are the consequences of alcohol consumption rather than its cause.…”