Adolescent susceptibility to degeneration may be due to multiple mechanistic factors that impair integrity or decrease volume. First, the adolescent brain is still developing, such that alcohol may have teratogenic effects that appear as degeneration in regions such as the PFC, mesolimbic system and hippocampus [7,38,48]. Second, alcohol is neurotoxic in many of these regions and past structural work has shown that some regions of the adolescent brain have greater sensitivity to alcohol neurotoxicity [7,9,49].
