Quitting Alcohol Triggers Brain Changes Linked to Relapse Risk, Mouse Study Finds

Giving up alcohol is associated with better health, but some people who stop drinking later return to more compulsive use. Researchers studying mice found that changes in a specific brain region appeared before this compulsive drinking began, raising the possibility that similar signals could one day help identify people at higher risk of relapse.

The team gave mice long-term voluntary access to alcohol, followed by a forced period of abstinence. A subset of the mice that went through abstinence later drank alcohol even after quinine was added to make it increasingly bitter, and drank larger quantities of that bitter alcohol than mice that had not been through forced abstinence.

The researchers then monitored a brain structure called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), previously linked to anxiety and depression in alcohol use disorder. When abstinent mice were returned to a setting where alcohol had previously been available, they attempted to drink even when only water was offered, and these attempts were tied to BNST activity. Mice that later developed a taste for the bitter alcohol showed more than double the BNST activity of mice that had not undergone forced abstinence, and this heightened activity appeared even before the mice were given access to the bitter alcohol.

Published in Molecular Psychiatry, the study notes that alcohol misuse is a major U.S. public health issue: deaths linked to alcohol use in 2024 were 4.5 times higher than deaths attributed to opioids, and diagnoses of alcohol use disorder have roughly doubled in the country since 1999. More than 80% of Americans aged 12 and older consume alcohol, and about 10% develop alcohol use disorder.