Human analyses will be essential to confirm biomarkers of alcohol-induced neuroinflammation and assess translatability of mechanistic findings from preclinical studies. Cell-type specific transcriptome analysis of post-mortem human alcoholic brain is an important future direction, and will be more feasible with advances in cell isolation methods (Habib et al., 2017; Krishnaswami et al., 2016; Simpson et al., 2018) and computational techniques (Kelley et al., 2018). Functional studies on alcohol-exposed human glia should also be prioritized. New in vitro models present an opportunity for examining alcohol’s functional effects on human microglia (Mizee et al., 2017) and astrocytes (Canals et al., 2018; Kitamura et al., 2018). Accordingly, tracking alcohol-induced neuroimmune activation in human subjects would be ideal, but methods are not yet adequate to achieve this goal. Studies with non-human primates can help link rodent findings to relevant human biomarkers, possibly through identification of peripheral predictors of CNS inflammation. Continual development of PET labeling methods for TSPO, P2X7, and other inflammatory markers in live human brain are also likely to provide important insight. A recently completed study examined the effects of alcohol on
