Drinking just three pints of beer in a weekend can cause FIVE TIMES as much damage to teenagers' blood cells

Downing just three pints of beer over a weekend can cause more than five times as much damage to teenagers' DNA compared to those who don't drink, according to new research.
Even a relatively small amount of alcohol damages teenagers' blood cells which effect the body's ability to break down toxins.
Scientists investigating the early stages of alcohol abuse and how it can affect DNA and blood cells looked at two groups of students aged 18 to 23, one who drank an average of one and a half litres of beer at weekends and the other who didn't.

Researchers have found that alcohol damages teenagers' blood cells which effect the body's ability to break down toxins (file picture)

The students were given blood tests to check that they had no health problems.
Researchers looked at the blood to see if there had been oxidative damage, which effects the body's ability to repair itself or break down toxins such as free radicals in the bloodstream.
The study, published in the journal Alcohol, found that the teenagers who drank at weekends were much more likely to have oxidative damage, which is linked to a variety of diseases in later life such as atherosclerosis, Parkinson's disease, heart attacks and Alzheimer's disease.
According to the World Health Organisation, alcohol is responsible for 2.5 million deaths a year worldwide and youngsters between the ages of 19 and 25 account for 320,000 of them.
The research is pioneering because it looks at the effect on alcohol on young, healthy people unlike most studies which examine alcohol abuse in people who have been consuming alcohol for a long time and who therefore display symptoms ranging from liver damage to various types of cancer, depression and disorders of the nervous system.
Professor Adela Rendsn, a researcher from the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, said: 'We saw that the ones who drank sustained twice as much oxidative damage compared with the group that did not consume alcohol.'

The study found teenagers who drank at weekends were much more likely to have oxidative damage (file picture)

The researchers then decided to carry on with their test to see how badly the DNA in blood cells of binge drinking teenagers had been affected.
Using a test called 'the comet test' the researchers extracted the nucleus of the lymphocytic cells in the blood and then ran an electric current through them (electrophoresis).
'The interesting thing is that if the chromatin (combination of DNA and proteins in the cell nucleus) is not properly compacted, if the DNA has been damaged, it leaves a halo in the electrophoresis which is called ‘the comet tail',' said Adela Rendsn.
The length of this can show how badly the DNA has been damaged- the longer the tail, the worse the damage.
The chromatin of the binge drinking group left a small halo greater than that of the group that had been sober.
Scientists discovered that the group that had been drinking had 44 per cent damage in their cells, compared to only eight per cent in the control group.
This meant that the drinking teenagers had 5.3 times more damaged cells, which was much more than the scientists expected.
'But the fact is, there should not have been any damage at all because they had not been consuming alcohol for very long. They had not been exposed in a chronic way,' said Adela Rendsn.
The way in which alcohol is able to alter DNA is not yet known but researchers wish to carry out further studies to explore this