"...For the first time, Dr. Knisely's research indicates how the damage occurs and how the ingestion of an alcoholic beverage triggers the mechanism that causes the damage.........
"I used to be a moderate drinker, but I have quit," he says. When he found in the laboratory the evidence of alcohol's effect on the brain, he felt it was not rational for any human being to continue using it, even for the sake of being a good fellow at a party. "There is only one way to be safe from the danger of alcohol," he declares; "that is to quit it cold."
The studies by Dr. Knisely and colleagues were carried out by focusing microscopes into the side of the white of the eye, which permits direct study of a statistically valid sample of the moving blood coming up from the heart through the aorta and then through all the arteries going into the head. In more than 200 healthy normal persons who had not been drinking, it was found that blood cells are separate from each other, that they do not stick together, but flow into and through narrow vessels easily and rapidly. The researchers then studied thirty persons brought to a private sanitarium because of alcoholic involvement, and correlated the concentration of alcohol in the blood of each patient with the physical condition of his blood, the rate of flow of blood through narrow vessels, and the number of vessels which were plugged.
Every person who had alcohol in his blood had red cells sticking together in wads. Even patients with as little as .025 percent alcohol in the blood showed agglutination of blood cells. Persons are not considered too drunk to drive in England until they have .08 percent alcohol in the blood; in some countries it is .05 percent; in some states of the United States the legal threshold is now .08. As concentrations of alcohol in the blood increased above .025 percent, the blood cell wads were larger, went through the narrowest vessel more slowly, and finally plugged visible vessels. Separate experiment showed that when agglutinated blood is visible in the vessels of the eye, it is also present all over the body.....
.....To return to the writings of Dr. Courville, among other things he pointed out that at autopsy, "the brain of the alcoholic is often edematous (saturated with watery fluid like an overfilled sponge), frequently it contains many congested small vessels, areas of atrophy in the cerebral convolutions (nervous tissue wasted away), and multiple hemorrhages from small vessels into the substances of the brain itself...
....His method, called pneumoenchphalography (PEG), consists of withdrawing a small amount of spinal fluid under a local anesthetic and replacing this with air, which passes harmlessly into the head. The air remains for a short time until it is absorbed, and there displaces the fluid in the cavities of the brain and makes the outlines of these cavities visible to X-rays. There is a special cavity in each side of the brain and one in the middle. The X-rays show that in people who have been drinking, the cavities are enlarged. This could only be true if the volume of the brain tissue itself has decreased. Surprisingly, people who had been mainly beer drinkers showed as much damage as persons who had been drinkers of whiskey, and often more.
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