Notably, this 50% decrease in neurogenesis is greater than the 21% decrease in cell proliferation, which suggests that new neurons born during binge alcohol exposure do not survive at the same rate as in controls. Therefore, to further explore cell survival, “percent survival” was calculated for each subject: the number of BrdU+ cells at 28 days (4D+28) was divided by the mean number of BrdU+ cells at D4 for its treatment group which showed 54.6 ± 5.1% of BrdU+ cell survived in the control group and only 35.7 ± 4.9% of alcohol exposed BrdU+ cells survived 28d later (p<0.05). This difference in percent of new cells surviving suggests that the reduction in neurogenesis is due to effects other than alcohol altering cell proliferation or cell differentiation. Therefore, we examined cell death immediately after the last dose of alcohol. To assess the effects of alcohol on cell death, adjacent tissue sections were dyed for a common marker of cell death, FJB, and FJB-positive (FJB+) cells were counted in the dentate gyrus and subgranular zone of the hippocampus. As shown in Figure
