Binge drinking escalates during adolescence, a time when significant maturation of the brain occurs (Spear, 2015). Perhaps because of that, adolescents are especially vulnerable to brain impairment by excessive ethanol exposure (Crews et al., 2016; Jacobus & Tapert, 2013; Welch, Carson, & Lawrie, 2013). To better understand how repeated binge drinking affects key brain regions, we modeled this behavior in rats. Male adolescent P rats were exposed to binge drinking for 3 weeks. The repeated voluntary binges altered gene expression in both the ventral hippocampus (vHip) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
