What happens to microglia cells and the brain when you have alcohol?

You mentioned that there’s a lot of controversy surrounding studies on alcohol and the brain, so controversy is the fact that when we’re talking about neuroinflammation or neurodegeneration, these cells get activated and produce toxic molecules, but you have to remember that cells are not normally there to produce toxic molecules. These guys are there to remove debris and produce trophic factors, and what we found is that the alcohol doesn’t necessarily cause them to make more toxic factors, but it reduces their ability to carry out their beneficial function, so that’s also like a yin and yang of this process. One of their beneficial features is to remove amyloid as well as other junk by a whole variety of processes and we happened to focus on one of them, but there’s several others we hope to get to in the future as well.