Alcohol Caffeine Combo Creates Chaos
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Party like a Rock Star to ring in the New Year usually means lots of alcohol but many more are adding caffeine to the mix to “party stronger-party longer.” Rum and coke has always been around but new friends like red bull and vodka and even premixed alcoholic energy drinks are the rage. A new study in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience shows that mixing the two may be much more dangerous than you think.
Alcohol is a depressant so people usually stop drinking when they feel too drunk or too tired. Caffeine added takes away the perception of being drunk so one may continue to drink. You really don’t sober up with a cup of coffee, you just may feel more alert so you take on more risks and still perform poorly as tested by University of Kentucky researcher, Mark Fillmore
In a recent study in the Journal of Behavioral Neuroscience, scientists gave groups of young adult mice alcohol alone to cause intoxication, caffeine alone in the equivalent of one up to six or eight cups of coffee for humans and a combination of both.
They looked at 3 functions:
Learning, Anxiety and Locomotion