Animals models have been necessary to understand the mechanism of alcohol effects on the integrity of these systems and provide more direct links between alcohol intake, behavioral impairments and neurodegeneration [7]. Although it is well established that alcohol has an enhanced amnestic effect on learning and memory performance in adolescent rats [6,56], only recently has it been shown that excessive alcohol exposure results in greater or more persistent effects on learning and memory in the adolescent [57,58]. Although the neurobiology of these hippocampus-dependent impairments is not clear, they correlate to hippocampal degeneration in human adolescent AUDs [44]. However, adolescent susceptibility to alcohol-induced cell death was only reported in frontal-anterior cortical regions [9]. Even though hippocampal degeneration is consistently reported in human adolescent AUDs, observations of hippocampal cell death in animal models are limited [10]. This discrepancy has lead to the exploration of additional mechanisms of degeneration.
