DURHAM - A new study finds adolescent alcohol use may be even more harmful than first thought. Dr. Scott Swartzwelder, senior author of the Duke Medicine study, says repeated alcohol use during the developmental period can result in brain damage affecting learning and memory.

Swartzwelder says he and other researchers got interested in the affect on the adolescent brain because of speedy growth.

"Because the adolescent brain is developing so rapidly and in such important ways, we thought maybe repeated alcohol exposure during the adolescent period might have long-term affects as well," Swartzwelder says.

And Swartzwelder says adolescence is not just someone's teen years.

"It's actually a pretty broad period," Swartzwelder says. "If you mark the beginning of adolescence as puberty and then the end of it when the brain kind of finishes its developmental work, you could spend 15 years in adolescence from 10 to 25."

Swartzwelder says repeated alcohol use during adolescence leads to damage of the hippocampus, or the memory center, in the brain.

"It's the first time people have drilled down into those kinds of mechanisms so that we can get a look at what's happening and how things are changing at a cellular level," he says.

The study was conducted on adolescent rats, which Swartzwelder says use their hippocampus in similar ways to humans.

"Rats, like humans, also have a very distinct period of adolescent development as marked by behavioral changes and chemical changes and brain changes," he says. "You always have to be careful interpreting rodent data to humans, but in this case, those interpretations are safer than in some others."

Swartzwelder's paper is published in the medical journal "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research."