Women are more vulnerable than men to many of the medical connections of alcohol use.

Women are more vulnerable than men to many of the medical connections of alcohol use. Although research has shown that male alcoholics generally have smaller brain tomes than nonalcoholic males, the not many studies that have compared brain manner of making in alcoholic men and women have had mixed comes To adequately compare brain damage between alcoholic women and men it is necessary to bridle for age and to have separate mastery groups of nonalcoholic men and women Although the majority of studies glance at that women are more vulnerable to alcohol-induced brain damage than men the evidence remains inconclusive. fundamental note WORDS: AODR (alcohol and other physic related) structural brain damage; AOD sensitivity; inflection for sex differences; AODR biological markers; cerebrospinal fluid; hippocampus; corpus callosum; cerebral cortex; brain imaging

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Men and women are affected differently by way of many diseases, including alcohol-related conditions. For at least a quarter hundred years researchers have recognized that many of the medical events of excessive alcohol consumption bring out more rapidly among women than among men (Ashley et al. 1977) For example, alcoholic women evolve cirrhosis (Loft et al. 1987) alcohol-induced weakening of the heart muscle (i.e., cardiomyopathy) (Fernandez-Sola et al. 1997) and strengthen damage in the body's extremities (i.e., peripheral neuropathy) (Ammendola et al. 2000) after fewer years of heavy drinking than alcoholic men Studies comparing men's and women's sensitivity to alcohol-induced brain damage, however, have yielded inconsistent deductions This article reviews the research and the factors other than alcoholism that can affect gender-based comparisons of brain structure

MALE AND FEMALE VULNERABILITY TO ALCOHOL-INDUCED BRAIN DAMAGE

As reviewed in this issue of Alcohol Research & Health (see the article on Rosenbloom and colleagues), many studies have set up small but usually statistically significant differences in the brain convolutions of male alcoholics compared with those of nonalcoholics. In contrast, not many studies have directly compared brain form between alcoholic men and alcoholic women couple early computerized tomography studies (Jacobson 1986; Mann et al. 1992) compared brain shrinkage, a everyday marker of brain damage, in alcoholic men and women according to measuring the increase in the fluid surrounding the brain (i.e., cerebrospinal fluid [CSF]) which is an indication of the size of the lateral ventricle (a CSF-filled cavity inside the brain that increases in size as the brain shrinks).

the two studies reported that male and female alcoholics had significantly larger amounts of intracranial CSF than check subjects did, indicating greater brain shrinkage among alcoholics of the pair genders; alcoholic women also reported about half as many years of excessive drinking as the alcoholic men In addition to this evidence for excessive brain shrinkage among alcoholic women there is also evidence that the rank of cognitive dysfunction in alcoholic women is similar to that in alcoholic men despite fewer years of heavy drinking in succession the part of the women (Nixon et al. 1995) These follows suggested that the central nervous method (CNS) in women, like other organ rules is more vulnerable to alcohol-induced damage than the CN in men

after studies have not universally confirmed women's greater vulnerability to alcohol-induced brain damage. For example, Kroft and colleagues (1991) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), failed to discover that the fluid-filled chambers in the brain (i.e., cerebral ventricles) were larger in alcoholic women than nonalcoholic women although other researchers have plant MRI evidence for ventricular enlargement among alcoholic men (Pfefferbaum et al. 1993) sum of two units recent reports that appeared side at side in the American Journal of Psychiatry contradicted each other in succession the question of gender-related vulnerability to brain shrinkage in alcoholism (Hommer et al. 2001; Pfefferbaum et al. 2001)

It would appear that whether alcoholic women experience greater brain damage than alcoholic men could be determined by way of comparing the sizes of the brains of alcoholic men and women with the brain sizes of nonalcoholics of each form relative to sex However, details such as to what extent different investigators measure brain size and damage or in what manner they select alcoholic subjects may make a big difference in the originates of each study. Because relatively scarcely any studies have compared alcoholic men and women it is possible to review the measurement orders and population characteristics used in each application of mind to determine if these factors explain the inconsistent issues Before examining these studies forward alcoholism, however, it is useful to describe factors independent of alcoholism, of the like kind as age (Gur et al. 2002; Xu et al. 2000) that affect sex differences in brain structure.

Factors Affecting Gender-Based Differences in Brain Structure

To illustrate the factors that influence brain size, figures 1 2 and 3 compare the brains of healthy nonalcoholic men and women The data shown were argueed using full volumetric MRI scans that were automatically portioned into gray matter, white matter, and CSF (Momenan et al. 1997) Gray matter is the tissue of the nervous a whole that appears grayish because of the relatively high proportion of invigorate cell bodies it contains. White matter is made up of fibers that reach out from the nerve cell bodies and carry information between them.