DTI investigations of acute alcohol intoxication in rats showed detectable but transient FA changes in the frontal lobe (Chen, Zeng, Shen, Kong, & Zheng, 2017). Indeed, transient FA changes upon acute alcohol intoxication are similar between rodents and human beings (Kong, Zheng, Lian, & Zhang, 2012). While binge alcohol exposure resulted in transient decreases in both FA and MD, chronic exposure to vaporized ethanol did quantifiably affect these measures (Pfefferbaum, Zahr, Mayer, Rohlfing, & Sullivan, 2015). In another chronic study, intermittent alcohol exposure showed no effects on FA, but did show reduced AD (hippocampus, cortex, and cerebellum), reduced RD (hippocampus and cortex), and reduced MD (cerebellum and corpus callosum) (Vetreno, Yaxley, Paniagua, & Crews, 2016). In general, the effects of chronic alcoholism on FA and MD described in the human literature (e.g., e.g., Bagga, Sharma, et al., 2014; Chanraud et al., 2009; Maksimovskiy et al., 2014; Pfefferbaum et al., 2000; Yeh et al., 2009) have not been replicated in the preclinical literature.
