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.