Blackouts: Causes, Side Effects, and Prevention

Alcohol-induced blackouts are characterized by an inability to recall memories of events that occurred during periods of alcohol intoxication. The underlying physiological effects involve specific brain structures, notably the hippocampus, which is essential for memory consolidation — the process of transferring memories from short-term to long-term storage. During an alcohol-induced blackout, alcohol disrupts this process, resulting in gaps in memory retention. Research indicates that the risk of blackouts increases with the rate of alcohol consumption and the total amount consumed.

Blood Alcohol Concentrations and Blackouts

On average, students estimated that they consumed roughly 11.5 drinks before the onset of the blackout. Males reported drinking significantly more than females, but they did so over a significantly longer period of time. As a result, estimated peak BACs during the night of the last blackout were similar for males (0.30 percent) and females (0.35 percent). As Goodwin observed in his work with alcoholics (1969b), fragmentary blackouts occurred far more often than en bloc blackouts, with four out of five students indicating that they eventually recalled bits and pieces of the events. Roughly half of all students (52 percent) indicated that their first full memory after the onset of the blackout was of waking up in the morning, often in an unfamiliar location. Many students, more females (59 percent) than males (25 percent), were frightened by their last blackout and changed their drinking habits as a result.

How your gut microbes shape your health

Research indicates that it is one of the most effective psychotherapeutic approaches, with widespread adoption across treatment facilities. It is recognized for its potential to reduce relapse rates and improve overall quality of life, making it a cornerstone of behavioral therapy for AUD. Studies also support the use of CBT in digital formats, extending its reach to those hesitant to seek traditional therapy. In experiments on rodents my colleagues and I tested how much alcohol is needed for this to happen. We discovered the blood alcohol concentration must be dangerously high, about 300 milligrams per deciliter, corresponding to about 2.4 parts per thousand.

1. A 2016 study led by Ralph Hingson, also of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, provided some answers.
2. Aside from the sex differences, there could be a genetic component to who is more likely to blackout.
3. The term “blackout” refers to the loss of memory caused by a fast spike in blood alcohol level (BAC).
4. A neurally mediated syncope is usually benign and requires no further treatment.
5. Even infrequent blackouts can indicate you are misusing alcohol and should be taken seriously.

Long-Term Effects of Blacking Out

These episodes can range from fragmentary blackouts, with some memories intact, to en bloc blackouts, where the individual has no recollection of a span of time. The primary factor in these alcohol-induced blackouts is a significant impairment in the brain’s ability to transfer memories from short-term to long-term storage, a process called memory consolidation, which primarily involves the hippocampus. Binge drinking, defined by the CDC as consuming five https://rehabliving.net/ or more drinks for men or four or more drinks for women in about two hours, is commonly linked to blackouts. However, blackouts can also result from combining alcohol with certain medications, such as benzodiazepines or ‘z-drugs’ like zolpidem, used for treating insomnia. Research indicates that those with a history of alcohol-induced blackouts show contextual memory impairments after alcohol consumption, while those without such a history do not.

practical implications and recommendations for future studies

The term “brownouts” is generally used to refer to fragmentary blackouts where pieces of what happened can be recalled or where parts of memory return. The term “blackout” describes a blackout where the memory never formed and cannot be remembered, no matter how hard you try. Alcohol blackouts are when alcohol completely inhibits your ability to form new memories. Even though someone may act completely normal while experiencing an alcohol blackout, they cannot remember anything that happened during the blackout once they become sober. In rats, White showed that there are doses of alcohol where brain cells “still kind of work”, and higher doses where they are completely off – which explains partial blackouts where only fragments are lost. At the same time, two other important brain areas that feed the hippocampus information about what’s happening in the world are also suppressed when we drink alcohol, explains White.

The most common and less severe fragmentary blackout, commonly referred to as a “brownout,” gives you fuzzy memories with details missing. You might remember downing a line of shots, but not ordering them at the bar, or arriving home, but not the taxi journey. Even infrequent blackouts can indicate you are misusing alcohol and should be taken https://rehabliving.net/buspirone-uses-dosage-side-effects/ seriously. Someone with blackouts should seriously consider cutting back their alcohol use or seeking help for addiction. However, they are still as susceptible to blackouts if they keep on drinking. If you notice signs of rapid intoxication, such as slurred speech, poor coordination or blurry vision, you may be overconsuming alcohol.

Knight and colleagues (1999) observed that 35 percent of trainees in a large pediatric residency program had experienced at least one blackout. Similarly, Goodwin (1995) reported that 33 percent of the first-year medical students he interviewed acknowledged having had at least one blackout. “They drank too much too quickly, their blood levels rose extremely quickly, and they experienced amnesia” (p. 315). In a study of 2,076 Finnish males, Poikolainen (1982) found that 35 percent of all males surveyed had had at least one blackout in the year before the survey. Alcohol-induced blackouts are not only common among drinkers but also a major source of psychological distress. A blackout involves the inability to recall events due to the alcohol’s interference with memory consolidation in the hippocampus, leading to gaps in a person’s memory.

Popular media and some celebrities with drug problems glamorize blacking out, and not being able to remember what happened the night before is the topic of many fun-filled tales. But blackouts are no laughing matter, according to expert researcher Dr. Marc Schuckit. We do know that women are more likely to experience other effects of alcohol, such as liver cirrhosis, heart damage, nerve damage and other diseases caused by alcohol.

However, long-term effects of chronic alcohol abuse — such as liver damage, nerve damage and increased cancer risk — do not always go away. For example, people with minor liver problems can recover from heavy drinking if they stop drinking. People who are drunk or blacked out are more likely to try illicit drugs than they would be sober. In a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Alcohol and Drug Abuse, only one out of 50 college students who had experienced a blackout said they blacked out after drinking beer alone.

If a person experiences blackouts as a result of stress, this is known as a psychogenic blackout. While these blackouts are similar to syncope and epileptic blackouts, the causes are different. Since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved them in 2019, doctors have been able to prescribe cenobamate tablets for adults who experience blackouts during seizures. According to the University of California, San Francisco, one particular type of epileptic seizure that causes blackouts is a tonic-clonic seizure — also known as a grand-mal seizure.

Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers—including college drinkers—than was previously assumed, and have been found to encompass events ranging from conversations to intercourse. Mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments include disruption of activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a central role in the formation of new auotbiographical memories. As detailed in this brief review, alcohol can have a dramatic impact on memory. Alcohol primarily disrupts the ability to form new long-term memories; it causes less disruption of recall of previously established long-term memories or of the ability to keep new information active in short-term memory for a few seconds or more. At low doses, the impairments produced by alcohol are often subtle, though they are detectable in controlled conditions.

Given that many college students use other drugs in combination with alcohol (O’Malley and Johnston 2002), some of the blackouts reported by students may arise from polysubstance use rather than from alcohol alone. Indeed, based on interviews with 136 heavy-drinking young adults (mean age 22), Hartzler and Fromme (2003b) concluded that en bloc blackouts often arise from the combined use of alcohol and other drugs. White and colleagues (2004) observed that, among 50 undergraduate students with a history of blackouts, only 3 students reported using other drugs during the night of their most recent blackout, and marijuana was the drug in each case.

Perhaps the most common myth about a blackout is that it involves passing out. This might well happen at some point, but during a blackout the person is often still able to talk and laugh and flirt and sing and dance, and may appear to be in control of all their faculties. However, the next day there will be no memory of those things, so it’s as if they didn’t really happen. Blackouts come in two types, Dr. White says, depending on how severely the hippocampus is impaired.

Optimally, actual BrACs orblood draws could be collected to back-extrapolate peak BACs to the time ofblackout. This information will enable researchers to statistically control forthe direct effects of alcohol consumption and examine factors that influencealcohol-induced blackouts over and beyond the amount of alcohol consumed. In a similar study, Ryback (1970) examined the impact of alcohol on memory in seven hospitalized alcoholics given access to alcohol over the course of several days. Blackouts occurred in five of the seven subjects, as evidenced by an inability to recall salient events that occurred while drinking the day before (e.g., one subject could not recall preparing to hit another over the head with a chair). Estimates of BAC levels during blackout periods suggested that they often began at levels around 0.20 percent and as low as 0.14 percent.

However, alcohol blackouts are a serious threat to a person’s health and safety. They increase the risk of other dangerous activities and consequences, such as injury, sexual assault, violence and alcohol poisoning. Provision of misinformation,the passage of time, and being asked or interviewed about prior events can alllead to memory distortions as the individual strives to reconstruct prior events(Loftus and Davis, 2006; Nash and Takarangi, 2011). Consequently,the reliability or accuracy of memories that are recalled following a period ofalcohol-induced amnesia are likely to be suspect. Using longitudinal methods, Schuckit andcolleagues (2015) and Wilhite andFromme (2015) focused specifically on prospective analyses ofalcohol-induced blackouts. Schuckit andcolleagues (2015) used latent class growth analysis to evaluate thepattern of occurrence of alcohol-induced blackouts across 4 time points in 1,402drinking adolescents between the ages of 15–19.

Avoid binge drinking, which is defined as consuming five or more drinks in about two hours for men, or four or more drinks for women. Studies have also found that women may be at greater risk of blackouts even though they generally drink less alcohol less frequently than men. This may be due to the physiological differences that affect alcohol distribution and metabolism. As you drink more alcohol and your blood alcohol level rises, the rate and length of memory loss will increase. And the higher blood alcohol levels reach, the more likely a person will black out. The more genetically susceptible an individual is, the less alcohol is required to black out.

Large quantities of alcohol, particularly if consumed rapidly, can produce a blackout, an interval of time for which the intoxicated person cannot recall key details of events, or even entire events. En bloc blackouts are stretches of time for which the person has no memory whatsoever. Fragmentary blackouts are episodes for which the drinker’s memory is spotty, with “islands” of memory providing some insight into what transpired, and for which more recall usually is possible if the drinker is cued by others. Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers than previously assumed and should be viewed as a potential consequence of acute intoxication regardless of age or whether one is clinically dependent upon alcohol.

Blackouts, her team found, serve as a “teachable moment after which individuals are more likely to respond to intervention”. She says that, during her blackouts, she could still function, take part in conversations and respond to jokes, in the same way that Goodwin’s subjects could perform calculations. Only those who knew her well could recognise her “glassy-eyed unplugged” look of being in a blackout state.

Studies also suggest that prenatal exposure to alcohol increases a person’s chance of experiencing blackouts in the future, and certain genes may increase a person’s likelihood to black out. The researchers tested their memories after the first hour by showing them images and asking them to recall the details two minutes, 30 minutes and 24 hours later. Most men were able to remember the images two minutes after seeing them, but half of the men could not remember them 30 minutes or 24 hours later. In a 1970 experiment, researchers in the Washington University School of Medicine’s psychiatry department gave 10 men with a history of alcohol addiction 16 to 18 ounces of 86-proof bourbon in a four-hour period. They may seem articulate because most parts of the brain are alcohol-tolerant.

Individual differences, including genetic factors, may also influence a person’s susceptibility to blackouts. For instance, some individuals experience memory impairments after consuming alcohol more frequently than others with similar drinking patterns. This suggests that personal history, including previous blackout experiences and individual neurochemical responses to alcohol, can influence the likelihood of experiencing a blackout. Although our understanding ofalcohol-induced blackouts has improved dramatically, additional research isclearly necessary.