Scientists who studied the effects of booze on mice may have discovered a key driver of binge drinking in women.
Women increased their heavy consumption of alcohol more than men during Covid lockdowns, previous research had shown, but little was known about what drives such behaviour.
Experts in the US investigated binge drinking in females by serving alcohol to female mice while monitoring their hormone cycles.
They found the rodents drank more alcohol on days when their levels of circulating oestrogen were high than when it was low.
The hormone appeared to boost brain activity in a region of the brain linked to binge drinking behaviour.
Dr Kristen Pleil, an associate professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, said: “When a female takes her first sip from the bottle containing alcohol, those neurons go crazy. And if she’s in a high-oestrogen state, they go even crazier.”
The effect was particularly strong in the first 30 minutes after alcohol was made available, a behaviour that Dr Pleil referred to as “front-loading”.
The team was surprised by how quickly the hormone appeared to have an effect – triggering binge drinking within minutes.
Through further tests, they determined that the hormone was binding to receptors on the surface of neurones where it modulated cell to cell communication.
Dr Pleil added: “We believe this is the first time that anybody has shown that during a normal oestrous cycle, endogenous oestrogen made by the ovaries can use such a rapid mechanism to control behaviour.”
The team suggested that blocking the action of the enzyme that produces oestrogen could be a potential avenue for treatments to reduce alcohol consumption.
A similar drug is already used in the US to treat women with oestrogen-related cancers. Dr Pleil said it could provide a “targeted approach for treating alcohol use disorder”.
The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
