Effects of ethanol on the rat brain: ultrastructural alterations in the temporal cortex and in the hippocampus

Male rats were submitted either to an oral alcohol intoxication or to chronological aging. Nervous morphometry shows that chronic alcohol consumption induces an increase in the proportion of neurons with dense cytoplasm and an increase of the synaptic cleft affecting principally synapses with spherical vesicles. The cerebrovascular morphometry revealed that the vascularity enhances with chronic alcohol consumption in young animal. The same enhancement is observed in aged animals showing thus a parallelism between alcoholised and aged animals.