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YOU’RE more likely to suffer severe head injuries in a car crash if you’ve been drinking alcohol. Brian Zink and his team at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor took brain scans from 58 people involved in car crashes and asked a neurosurgeon to assess their head injuries. After taking into account the severity of the crashes, Zink compared the brain damage of people who’d been drinking with that of non-drinkers. He found that drinkers were more than twice as likely to suffer severe head injuries as those who hadn’t touched a drop (Alcohol and Alcoholism vol 37, p 236). Animal studies suggest this is because alcohol disrupts breathing and lowers blood pressure in the brain after impact.