It helps to know.

Does Alcohol kill the brain cells?

You must have noticed that when you attend  a party and take few drinks just for pleasure and company, you feel drowsy with slurred speech. In addition, your vision gets blurred, and sometimes the gait also becomes difficult. But as you stop drinking all reverts back to normal. That may give you some idea that alcohol does effect your brain! But drinking at constant period of times, you start getting signs of deficit in your mental functions. The memory loss and social interactions, work performance and living hygiene. All these features stay even if you stop drinking, indicating a significant negative and harmful influence of Alcohol on your brain cells. Memory loss in terms of incidence, people, spoken words and objects.

Why Alcohol upsets the activity of your brain?

This question is still to be answered for sure. Under controlled drinking, alcohol effects are easily reversible. But heavy drinking for longer periods (binge drinking) have far reaching negative  influence on your brain cells. It is termed alcohol related brain impairment (ARBI). One aspect of damage to brain function in alcohol drinking in excess, is vitamin B1 deficiency. How this happens is not very difficult to guess. Alcohol causes such inflammatory changes in stomach wall that it hampers absorption of thiamine (B1) vitamin. This can be secondary to liver damaging effect of alcohol. Whatever the causative influence, the net result appears in form of damage to your brain. You may just experience memory impairment, or may develop episodes of black outs. If you keep on drinking heavy, the brain damage can go into syndrome of symptoms of memory loss, visual impairment, in-coordination of muscles, called Wernike-Korsakoff’s syndrome (Thiamine deficiency). The damage alcohol does to brain in W-K syndrome is sometimes permanent if left untreated with marked reduction in brain cells density.

Alcohol does not kill but succeeds in paralyzing brain cells.

As for number counts, alcohol does not literally kill brain cells. Or you may say it is still to be proved that it does, although it does everything else to your brain functions! But it has some inhibitory effect on new brain cells growth. What it does do is, it destroys the dendrites or antennae of brain cells. The impact is loss of proper communication between cells and malfunction. In more simpler term brain cells stop talking to each other. The damage to these communication channels is reversible once alcohol drinking stops for longer duration for regeneration to take place. The younger you are, the more damaging effects you will manifest, when indulgence in alcohol is of longer duration.

What damage does alcohol causes to brain?

Poor nutritional status, due to chronic (of long standing) alcoholism may cause Thiamine deficiency. There is not only damage to nerve supply to eye muscles, but also to very important part of brain called Cerebellum. The Cerebellum is helping in your body’s  coordination movements and some learning abilities. You should know that computerized tomographic (CT scanning) studies have revealed significant shrinkage of brain in both male in female alcoholics compared to non-alcoholics. There is all possibility for you to develop alcoholic dementia (deterioration in intellectual functions) if  binge drinking goes unabated. More of female alcoholics are effected by this condition. As it is very clear to you by now that, your heavy alcohol drinking, has deleterious effects on brain functions, whether it results from direct impact or general nutritional deficiency is still unclear. If you are female, you should be aware that alcohol harms you faster than male, even though men drink more. It is also a fact of significance that , when you are pregnant your baby will show signs of arrested growth and brain defects. Saying all that, most of adverse effects on your brain due to heavy drinking are reversible once you start rehab. Supplementing this recovery phase with good diet and vitamins will improve your mental and physical performance.