Psychology Division, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2021 May 3;16(5):e0250827. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250827. eCollection 2021.
Binge-drinking in adolescents and young adults is a widespread problem, however, an often unreported consequence of binge-drinking behaviour is an alcohol-induced memory blackout (MBO). An MBO is a transient amnesic event resulting from rapid, excessive alcohol consumption. Here, we examine the short-term impact of an alcohol-induced MBO event (testing < 20 hours after blackout) on memory performance in people who have experienced a high volume of MBOs. In addition, we aimed to test the hypothesis that people who experience a high volume of MBOs may have poorer recall than non-blackout controls in either sober or intoxicated states. Three episodic memory paradigms consisting of free recall, serial recall, and depth of encoding tasks, were conducted by a group of alcohol drinkers who had never experienced a memory blackout, and those who reported at least 9 in the preceding 12-months. Studies were completed sober and after alcohol by all participants, and sober but after blackout by the experimental group. Accuracy of recall was assessed with linear mixed effects modelling for all experiments and conditions. Recall rate both before and after alcohol consumption was similar between groups, with poorer recall after drinking alcohol by all participants in all three studies. After blackout, MBO participants showed no significant improvement from their intoxicated state in serial recall and depth of encoding tasks, but an improvement in free recall. Further analysis of these findings revealed that 10 out of 23 participants showed significantly impaired performance after blackout during free recall, extending up to 17 participants in serial recall. In general, alcohol reduced recall rate in both blackout and control participants similarly, but recall following MBO remained poor. Our evidence suggests that alcohol-induced blackouts impair memory functioning the next day, and future research should establish the duration of deficits after an acute alcohol-induced blackout episode.
青少年和年轻人的狂饮是一个普遍存在的问题，然而，狂饮行为的一个经常未被报道的后果是酒精引起的记忆缺失（MBO）。MBO 是一种由快速、过量饮酒引起的短暂性遗忘事件。在这里，我们研究了在经历过大量 MBO 的人中，一次酒精引起的 MBO 事件（测试时间在 MBO 后不到 20 小时）对记忆表现的短期影响。此外，我们旨在检验以下假设：经历过大量 MBO 的人在清醒或醉酒状态下的回忆能力可能比非 MBO 对照组差。通过一组从未经历过记忆缺失的酒精饮用者和那些在过去 12 个月内报告至少有 9 次记忆缺失的人进行了三个情节记忆范式，包括自由回忆、序列回忆和深度编码任务。所有参与者都在清醒和醉酒状态下完成了研究，实验组则在清醒和 MBO 后完成了研究。所有实验和条件均采用线性混合效应模型评估回忆的准确性。在两组中，饮酒前后的回忆率相似，所有参与者在三项研究中饮酒后回忆能力均下降。在 MBO 后，MBO 参与者在序列回忆和深度编码任务中没有从醉酒状态中显著改善，但在自由回忆中有所改善。对这些发现的进一步分析表明，在自由回忆中，MBO 后 23 名参与者中有 10 名表现出明显的受损，在序列回忆中，这一数字增加到 17 名。总体而言，酒精对 MBO 和对照组参与者的回忆率都有相似的影响，但 MBO 后回忆仍然较差。我们的证据表明，酒精引起的 MBO 会在第二天损害记忆功能，未来的研究应该确定急性酒精引起的 MBO 发作后缺陷的持续时间。
