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Although the liver remains the primary organ for alcohol metabolism, the brain’s cerebellum plays a bigger role in this process than once believed, according to a study in mice published on March 22 in Nature Metabolism. The researchers found that when an alcohol-processing enzyme is missing from the cerebellum in mice, the animals metabolized alcohol differently.
“My hypothesis is that the brain has a metabolic pathway in alcohol metabolism, and this pathway mediates some behavioral change,” says lead author Li Zhang, a staff scientist at the Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “This hypothesis is actually against dogma in the research of alcohol,” adds Zhang, who argues that the prevailing view is that metabolic work in the liver drives the effects of alcohol in the brain.
Zhang and colleagues sought to build on neuroimaging findings that cerebellar uptake of ...
