Neurosteroids Mediate Pharmacological Effects of Ethanol: A New Mechanism of Ethanol Action?

NDERSTANDING THE SITES of ethanol action that U mediate its acute and chronic neural and behavioral effects is critical to finding a treatment for alcoholism.Years of debate preceded the discoveries that ethanol, the most widely used drug in the world, directly interacts with ion channels in the brain (Crews et al., 1996) to produce many of the pharmacological effects of this drug.This symposium addressed the possibility that interactions with endogenous neuroactive intermediaries may contribute to ethanol actions in the brain and thereby alter neuronal and behavioral responses to ethanol.The neuroactive steroids under scrutiny are potent positive modulators of y-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptors in the brain-one of the putative sites of ethanol action investigated over the past 15 years (Morrow, 1995).