Recent functional studies suggest that excessive alcohol intake during adolescence has far greater consequences than previously considered [53]. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies that assess neural activity by measuring blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals have revealed abnormalities in the brain's response despite normal performance on some tasks [53,54]. Even more disturbing are recent findings that binge-drinking adolescents who do not meet criteria for AUDs show slight, but detectable cognitive impairments when compared to their non- or social-drinking peers [55]. For example, binge-drinking adolescents performed only marginally poorer on a simple verbal learning test compared to age-matched controls but showed increased neural activation in frontal, parietal and cingulate cortices during this task [55]. The consistent finding that BOLD responses are increased in adolescents with alcohol problems during different working memory-type tasks have lead the authors to hypothesize that the frontal lobe memory systems may compensate for deficiencies in medial temporal lobe function [54,55]. This suggestion is consistent with several studies that have shown degeneration in temporal lobe structures in adolescents with AUDs [42-44].
