Say “BORG” to people of a certain generation and they’re likely to think you’re making a Star Trek reference.
But on many college campuses across the country, the term now stands for “blackout rage gallon,” a binge drinking craze that’s gone viral on social media.
The BORG concoction mixes booze – typically vodka – drinking water, sweet flavorings and common hangover remedies like Pedialyte in a plastic gallon container.
The thought is the diluted beverage protects revelers from the after affects of consuming large quantities. In March, health officials reported nearly 50 students at the University of Massachusetts needed to be hospitalized and close to 30 ambulances reported to campus for BORG incidents in just one weekend.
The BORG fad can result in lasting long-term effects as well, according to OSF HealthCare critical care neurologist Dr. Deepak Nair.
“Binge drinking is more tightly correlated with the adverse and toxic effects of alcohol by itself. It's also more associated with alcoholism, compared to people who are spacing out their alcohol consumption,” said Nair, who serves as Director of Ambulatory and Virtual Neurology Services for OSF’s neuroscience service line.
“It also seems to be more tightly correlated with the neurotoxic effects. So, when you think about it from that sort of big picture view, this BORG trend seems to be uniquely dangerous to the brain, especially in young people.”
Nair said that attempting to mask the alcohol through the BORG mixture doesn’t really decrease the effects of overindulging.
“If you're consuming that entire volume of fluid, you're still getting all that alcohol and the dilution of water there doesn't really matter,” he said. “What matters here is the total amount of alcohol that's being consumed, and it would be no different than if you just drank that bottle of alcohol by itself.”
Nair said he hasn’t come across any incidents of BORG intoxication in Peoria yet, but concerns over binge drinking are always present.
“We see that (binge intoxication) fairly regularly, and it does seem to be somewhat seasonal,” he said. “Peoria being a college town, for example, at the start of the school year it’s always a pretty common trend, but then also towards the end of the school year when people are celebrating. I don't know that I have data on hand to say that that's necessarily been true this past year, but given the recency of this (BORG trend), we just may not be seeing it yet.”
Nair said it’s hard to know if BORG consumption is more or less risky than typical binge drinking.
“Certainly, the sheer volume of alcohol would be uniquely dangerous,” he said. “Here in the U.S., we define binge drinking as: I think it's something like more than four standard drinks within less than a two-hour period. So that's not a lot, right? I mean, if you've ever been out enjoying some cocktails with friends or things, that's easy to do. But here, you're talking about an entire bottle's worth of alcohol, that that would be several times that. So the sheer volume of alcohol here is uniquely risky, just because it's a lot.”
“If the dose is too much or the exposure is prolonged, now you're going to have a higher risk of permanent injury to those cells.”Dr. Deepak Nair
Nair said excess alcohol takes a heavy toll on the most important brain cells.
“If the dose is too much or the exposure is prolonged, now you're going to have a higher risk of permanent injury to those cells,” he said. “One of the common ways that that can present is that after a long enough duration of high alcohol consumption, it actually causes shrinkage of the brain; you're actually losing enough brain cells that we can see the size of the brain get smaller.”
Nair said repeated alcohol abuse in a binging manner could result in severe memory loss, lack of coordination, and abnormal eye movements.
“There are several clinical syndromes that are also associated with alcohol use. The generic term we would use is encephalopathy, or “alcoholic encephalopathy,” he said. “Encephalopathy is just a Greek term that literally means sick brain. So you're just having some impairment in brain function over time, though, that can become permanent.”
Nair said one of the most severe outcomes is known as Korsakoff psychosis.
“Korsakoff is when the memory is so impaired, and nature abhors a vacuum so your brain makes up details. I have had the misfortune to meet a couple of patients who suffered from this, where entire biographical details of their life have been lost to them,” he said.
“So they fill that in with sort of fantastical stories and the person doesn't know that they're making that up, and we can't tell either unless we interact with family or their loved ones. These are permanent, so there's no fix for that because it's coming from permanent toxic effects in the brain.”
