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        New Message Board Archives >> 2005 General Board Posts >> DESYNCHRONIZED CLOCK AND DRINK
        
(Message started by: ben_uk on Nov 7^th, 2005, 8:24am)

Title: DESYNCHRONIZED CLOCK AND DRINK
Post by ben_uk on Nov 7^th, 2005, 8:24am

Faulty body clock can drive people to drink
By Andy Coghlan
From issue 2479 of New Scientist magazine, 25 December 2004, page 9

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg18424794.700.html

http://tinyurl.com/9mkpt

SOME people may drink too much in an attempt to compensate for a faulty body-clock gene that locks them into a state of perpetual jet lag. The discovery could explain why an existing drug helps a few alcoholics stay dry.

Urs Albrecht and his team at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland studied mice with a defect in Per2, a key clock gene that helps set and maintain our 24-hour body cycle. Given the chance, the mutant mice drank three times as much alcohol as non-mutant mice. The team found that the hypothalamus, the brain area housing the body's master clock, was flooded with the neurotransmitter glutamate in the defective mice.

Albrecht wondered if the glutamate build-up was somehow stimulating the craving for alcohol. If so, a drug called acamprosate, given to recovering alcoholics to help prevent relapse and known to drive down glutamate levels, might have some effect. Sure enough, when mice with the Per2 mutation were given acamprosate they drank even less than non-mutant mice (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm1163).

Next, team member Michael Soyka of the University of Munich in Germany looked for Per2 mutations in human DNA samples. In a study of 215 individuals, he found that one particular Per2 variation does indeed appear to be linked with heavy drinking.

This raises another intriguing possibility: could this gene variation explain why acamprosate prevents relapse in only 10 to 20 per cent of those prescribed it? Next year, Soyka plans to see if drinkers with defective clock genes respond better to the drug than other drinkers. If they do, screening for carriers could be a good way of optimizing treatment with acamprosate, which is already available in Europe and was approved in the US last July.

The findings might also explain why airline staff and shift workers who experience constant jet lag often become habitual drinkers. "They have a normal but desynchronized clock, and drink to reset it," Albrecht says.

:o
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