The Office of Public Safety, in conjunction with WesWELL, the Dean of Students Office and Res Life will be holding four Severe Intoxication Panels designed to help students understand the best course of action to take for a friend that can not make an informed decision due to their impairment.

The representatives on the panel will speak about the issues from their perspective.  The panel discussion will give you a chance to have questions about alcohol policies and procedures answered.  You will learn what the signs of severe intoxication are, what Public Safety will do when responding to a call for help, what the Dean of Students Office will do when a student is referred to them after being treated for intoxication and more.

The panels will be held on the following dates and times:

All students are welcome to attend any of these panels. We would look forward to seeing you and speaking with you about this very important issue.

When teens go on a binge drinking episode, they may be doing serious damage to the sensitive “white matter” in their brain, a new MRI-based study suggests.

White matter is involved in relaying information between brain cells, the researchers said. This means that damage caused to the developing brain by bouts of heavy drinking could affect thinking and memory, even lowering school performance.

Although white matter impairment has been seen in the brains of adult alcoholics, “we were somewhat surprised that these adolescents who had histories of binge drinking showed significantly poorer quality of their white matter,” said lead researcher Susan F. Tapert, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and director of Substance Abuse/Mental Illness at the VA San Diego Healthcare System.

read full article…

Check out Rethinking Drinking, a new Web site from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. 

For anyone who drinks, this site offers valuable, research-based information. What do you think about taking a look at your drinking habits and how they may affect your health? Rethinking Drinking can help you get started.

What words we choose can have a powerful influence on how we view almost anything — history, a political situation, a person, even our own behaviors and the behaviors of others. The meaning we assign to those words can also influence our perception. For example, the meaning one person assigns to the phrase “hooking up” might be very different than the meaning their potential sexual partner assigns it. This can lead to confusion, misunderstanding and more. 

When it comes to the language of intoxication and drinking, University of Missouri researchers identified two areas of significant interest. The language used by different genders — in this study defined only as male and female — varies greatly, as does the language and by the experts vs. the drinkers studied.  WebMD reported on the study: 

Alcohol researchers often rely on objective measures, which don’t reflect subjective feelings or experiences, Levitt tells WebMD.

One problem is that people perceive the word “drunk” in many ways.

He and his colleagues studied 290 college students, ranging in age from 17 to 24. They later questioned another sample of 145 undergraduates. In both groups, most students described themselves as “moderate” drinkers.

“We found that intoxication-related terms reflected either moderate or heavy levels of intoxication, and that ‘drunk’ reflected a level of intoxication somewhere between moderate and heavy,” Levitt says. “Men tended to use heavy-intoxication words more than women, which were also relatively more forceful in their tone, such as ‘hammered’.

“Women tended to use moderate intoxication words more than men, which were also relatively more euphemistic, such as ‘tipsy.’”

But their use of the word “tipsy” reflected an average of four drinks over two hours, which researchers say meets the definition of binge drinking for women but not for men.

When males in the study used words like “trashed” or “wasted,” it reflected about eight drinks over two hours, Levitt tells WebMD.

read full article here

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/surrealmuse/4757004/

Want to know more about what your BAC level means? Go here. 

Maybe that seems like something to worry about in the far-flung future, but new research indicates it may boil down to four simple things you can do that will prolong your life by an average of 14 years and improve your overall health in the meantime. The Mayo Clinic Health Letter reports on this research.

Does the bombardment of information on how to improve your health just leave you feeling confused? Try focusing on this straightforward advice:

1. Have no more than two alcoholic beverages a day.
2. Don’t smoke.
3. Get at least the equivalent of 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day.
4. Eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day.

According to a recent study published in the January 2008 edition of Public Library of Science Medicine, people who follow those steps live an average of 14 years longer than those who don’t. Mayo Clinic experts would further recommend that women of all ages — and men over 65 — have no more than one drink a day.

For the study, researchers interviewed and examined over 20,000 reasonably healthy men and women aged 45 to 79, living in Norfolk County, United Kingdom. Their health status was checked again after many years.

Researchers found that regardless of sex, social status — or even body weight — those who followed none of the recommendations listed above had four times the risk of dying over the course of a decade than did those who followed all of the recommendations. Not smoking offered the greatest benefits in terms of survival.

Discussion Question: If you knew you could live longer by doing these four things, would you? Or if you are already doing these things, does it help motivate you to maintain these choices? And what would you do with the extra time?

or view it here.

“We’ve seen a whole series of new trends over the past five to 10 years,” said Michael Musalek, director of the Anton Proksch Institute, a renowned Austrian detox center that claims to be Europe’s largest.

“For one, the age of alcohol beginners keeps declining. Today, 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds are already drinking — some on a regular basis,” he said.

Hospital officials notice the same trend.

At Vienna’s General Hospital, up to three teens are admitted each weekend after drinking escapades escalate, often leaving them so intoxicated they become unconscious, pediatrician Zsolt Szepfalusi said. More cases are common during special events, such as the city’s annual Danube Island Fest in the summer, he said. read full article…

Discussion Questions: Why is Europe held up as an ideal model when it is experiencing problems similar to our own? What do you see as some of the factors that contribute to binge or “coma” drinking in both the U.S. and Europe? What can be done to reduce the problems?

Women and men tend to have different types of stress-related psychological disorders. Women have greater rates of depression and some types of anxiety disorders than men, while men have greater rates of alcohol-use disorders than women. A new study of emotional and alcohol-craving responses to stress has found that when men become upset, they are more likely than women to want alcohol.

read full article…

Discussion: How do you feel these differences play out on campus?

 Introduction to alcohol

• What is alcohol?
• How does alcohol affect a person?
• Why do some people react differently to alcohol than others?
• What is a standard drink in the United States?
• Is beer or wine safer to drink than hard liquor?

Drinking levels

• What does moderate drinking mean?
• Is it safe to drink alcohol and drive?
• What does it mean to be above the legal limit for drinking?
• How do I know if it’s okay to drink?

Excessive alcohol use

• What do you mean by heavy drinking?
• What is binge drinking?
• What is the difference between alcoholism and alcohol abuse?
• What does it mean to get drunk?

Drinking problems

• How do I know if I have a drinking problem?
• What can I do if I or someone I know has a drinking problem?
• What health problems are associated with excessive alcohol use?

Special populations

• I’m young, is drinking bad for my health?
• Is it okay to drink when pregnant?