Heavy drinking and high blood alcohol levels induce neurodegeneration and frontal cortical dysfunction. As mentioned above, frontal cortical dysfunction and impulsivity likely contribute to the consumption of dangerous amounts of alcohol despite the knowledge that problems occur as a result of drinking, the key characteristic of alcohol use disorders. Alcohol use disorder is in part due to a heavy drinking environment. High alcohol consumption causes neurodegeneration that contributes to loss of executive functions. In general, human alcoholics, both men and women, have lower brain volume of cortical and subcortical brain structures that include both widespread grey and white matter volumes below age matched averages (Crews and Nixon, 2008). This occurs in the absence of major nutritional deficiencies, although nutritional deficiencies can cause neurodegeneration and could contribute to alcoholic degeneration (Bowden et al., 2001). Both post-mortem and in vivo imaging studies of alcoholic brain morphology find abnormal reduced brain volumes of grey and white matter across multiple regions of the brain. However, neuronal loss, likely, does not account for all the volume loss, although the superior frontal cortex (Harper and Kril,
