Excessive drinking causes brain damage in women more quickly than in men, according to a team of scientists.
The finding is especially worrying in the light of reports that binge drinking among women is soaring.
Scientists at the University of Heidelberg in Germany took brain scans of 158 volunteers, 76 of whom were alcoholic men and women.
They found they could use the brain scans to trace the progression of alcohol dependency in women.
The scans also revealed that alcohol-induced brain damage could be picked up much earlier in women than men.
Most of the damage was seen in an area of the brain called the frontal lobes, which are involved in problem solving and memory formation.
The women developed equal brain-volume reductions as the men after a significantly shorter period of alcohol dependence.
The study, which appeared in the May issue of the Journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, supports evidence that the harmful
effects of alcohol differ between the sexes.
The number of women drinking more than 14 ounces of alcohol a week increased by 70% between 1988 and 2002. Women aged 16 to 24 are most prone
to binge drinking, with 49% cramming their weekly consumption into one to three days.
To drink safely women should not consume more than two or three ounces of alcohol a week.
The rise of excessive drinking among women is believed to be driven by increased economic independence, a trend to delay starting families,
fewer social taboos and increased targeting by the drinks industry.
Another study done in Russia confirmed that the brain-damaging effects of alcohol affect women more quickly than men.
Researchers asked more than 100 alcoholics between the ages of 18 and 40, as well as 68 non-alcoholics, to complete a series of brain function tests.
Female alcoholics performed worse on tests of visual working memory, cognitive flexibility, and spatial planning and problem solving, even
though the duration of alcohol use was significantly longer for men (averaging 15 years) than women (averaging 11 years).
However, 91 percent of the women reported binge drinking, as opposed to only 72 percent of the men surveyed.
Other physiological damage resulting from alcoholism, such as heart and liver problems, were already known to occur more quickly in women than in men,
an effect known as telescoping.
The main reason women process alcohol differently than men is purely physiological.
Women metabolize alcohol more quickly then men because men have more alcohol-diluting water in their bodies,
and women have less of an enzyme that makes alcohol inactive.
