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Alcohol-laden 'energy' drinks could heighten risks due to intoxication, study suggests
Drinking a cup or two of coffee after a taking few rounds of alcohol will not make you sober enough to enable you drive a car safely, a recent study says. While alcohol may lower the effects of caffeine, caffeine doe not lessen the decision-making impairment caused by alcohol, the researchers found.
They further said that the implications of the study also have special significance for younger people, who comprise the target market of the new high-octane, alcohol-caffeine combination beverages.
Study co-author Thomas Gould, said that caffeine lessens the sedative effects of alcohol but it does not cause improvement in cognitive function, "which means that decision-making processes may be compromised." Gould said people have the assumption that they are "not as drunk as they are and the impaired cognition that remains may lead to poor choices and decision-making." And, he added, when it comes to caffeine-alcohol mix, people usually tend to drink more.
The study appears in the current issue of the journal Behavioral Neursocience.
According to Gould, who is also the director of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia, caffeine has no impact on the alcohol levels in the blood, "and it doesn't change things as far as being able to make proper choices, and those can lead to very dire consequences."
Another expert, Jean Bidlack, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, concurred that "alcohol and coffee are not a good mix."
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking a look at the safety and legality issues of manufacturing and marketing popular alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. In November, letters were sent by the agency to almost 30 manufacturing companies of such products, which are being sold under such names as "Joose," "Spykes" and "Sparks," requiring them to provide evidence pertaining to the safety of their products, and under what authority they believe they can put them out in the market.
An FDA news release mentioned that up to 26 percent of students in college drink these high-octane drinks.
"There is a folklore that caffeine can sober you up," Gould said. According to him, they are specifically testing to find out if caffeine could bring about an improvement in the cognitive deficits induced by alcohol.
For the study, Gould and his colleagues gave mice ethanol or caffeine, or a mixture of the two and studied their behavior in a maze that had been specially designed.
Even though they demonstrated more physical movements around the maze, mice that had been given ethanol showed less anxiety and a decreased learning ability. Essentially, this meant that they were slamming into things which they should have known were there.
On the other hand, caffeine brought about anxiety while reducing both locomotion and ability to learn.
When a combination of the two was given, ethanol meddled with the anxiety-generating effect of caffeine; however, caffeine was incapable of restoring the impact of ethanol on learning. What you got, according to the researchers, was a slipshod mouse with a tendency to take risks and with no knowledge it was taking risks.
Jeffrey T. Parsons, chairman of psychology at Hunter College in New York City, said that this contributes to the "growing body of evidence that individuals who combine caffeinated energy drinks with alcohol may be inadvertently putting themselves at greater risk due to poor decision-making and the misperception that their judgment is intact."
Parsons added though that one of the cautions that need to be considered regarding the study is the fact that it was using an animal model, "so we need to do more research to test this with humans. But I think the take-home message is a rum and coke isn't going to stop you from being intoxicated and potentially making bad decisions," he said.
Bonnie Levin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that people belonging to the younger generation already have the tendency to take risks and make impulsive decisions.
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