Binge alcohol alters exercise-driven neuroplasticity

My takeaway from this is not to binge because there are so many positives of alcohol. Don't listen to me, I have no medical background.
I bet your doctor reflexively tells you not to drink alcohol. Up to your discretion.

Alcohol for these 12 reasons.

A little daily alcohol may cut stroke risk

An occasional drink doesn't hurt coronary arteries

Negative here:

 Binge alcohol alters exercise-driven neuroplasticity

• Emily A. Barton^{a, ,} ,
• Yanbin Lu^b, ,
• Murad Megjhani^b, ,
• Mark E. Maynard^a, ,
• Prathamesh M. Kulkarni^b, ,
• Badrinath Roysam^b, ,
• J. Leigh Leasure^{a, c,}

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2016.11.041

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Highlights

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Binge alcohol exerts a prolonged influence on cortical microglia morphology.

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Exercise increases cortical microglia.

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Binge alcohol suppresses this exercise-driven increase in microglia.

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Abstract

Exercise is increasingly being used as a treatment for alcohol use disorders (AUD), but the interactive effects of alcohol and exercise on the brain remain largely unexplored. Alcohol damages the brain, in part by altering glial functioning. In contrast, exercise promotes glial health and plasticity. In the present study, we investigated whether binge alcohol would attenuate the effects of subsequent exercise on glia. We focused on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), an alcohol-vulnerable region that also undergoes neuroplastic changes in response to exercise. Adult female Long-Evans rats were gavaged with ethanol (25% w/v) every 8 h for 4 days. Control animals received an isocaloric, non-alcohol diet. After 7 days of abstinence, rats remained sedentary or exercised for 4 weeks. Immunofluorescence was then used to label microglia, astrocytes, and neurons in serial tissue sections through the mPFC. Confocal microscope images were processed using FARSIGHT, a computational image analysis toolkit capable of automated analysis of cell number and morphology. We found that exercise increased the number of microglia in the mPFC in control animals. Binged animals that exercised, however, had significantly fewer microglia. Furthermore, computational arbor analytics revealed that the binged animals (regardless of exercise) had microglia with thicker, shorter arbors and significantly less branching, suggestive of partial activation. We found no changes in the number or morphology of mPFC astrocytes. We conclude that binge alcohol exerts a prolonged effect on morphology of mPFC microglia and limits the capacity of exercise to increase their numbers.