Small amounts of alcohol or anesthetics may damage the develo...( cause nerve cells in the developing br...)

Those findings prompted them to study alcohol, which is known both to block NMDA glutamate activity and also to enhance GABA activity. They found that alcohol powerfully triggers nerve cell suicide in the developing brain, providing a likely explanation for the learning and memory disturbances associated with the human fetal alcohol syndrome.

"In all of these studies, we have found that drugs that enhance GABA inhibition or that inhibit glutamate excitation can trigger massive cell suicide in the developing brain," Olney says.

Olney believes by better understanding the mechanism through which alcohol and drugs cause brain cell suicide, it might be possible to prevent it. He compares the process to a line-up of dominoes in which one step triggers the next, but by understanding that cascade, he hopes it might be possible to intervene.

"We're going to see if there are some steps in that line-up of dominoes that we can interfere with to prevent the suicide signal from being activated," he says.

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Contact: Jim Dryden
jdryden@wustl.edu
314-286-0110
Washington University School of Medicine
13-Feb-2004