5. Perspectives
Despite the extensively reported negative impacts of alcohol on health,
alcohol consumption persists at high rates worldwide. Alcohol abuse
generates significant impairments in cognition, which have been
demonstrated by rodent models. Morphological alternations of the
hippocampus after exposure to ethanol may explain physiological
impairments. To enhance memory consolidation, SWRs help transport
compressed hippocampus representation to dispersed circuits. Selective
disruption of SWRs interferes with memory. To the author’s knowledge,
there is no evidence of research where Sharp Wave Ripples are evaluated
in association with memory impairment produced by chronic alcohol
administration. The study of the effect of alcohol on SWRs as a memory
consolidation biomarker may provide an opportunity for new forms of
management to restore and improve cognitive impairment in alcoholism.
This could be done by utilizing alcoholism animal models, such as rats
exposed to chronic levels of alcohol, and recording their SWRs during
“off-states”. The detection and analysis of SWRs could be assisted by
automatic detection algorithms that have been previously reported for
HFOs. Out of all the algorithms reported here, the parallel
implementation of several methodologies can potentially resolve false
negative identification of events. Additionally, implementation of
several methodologies on similar datasets is necessary to pinpoint a
gold standard that performs best in all contexts with minimal
adjustments.