A new study has found that drinking alcohol heavily during teenage years can result in changes to your brain that deal with memory and learning.

Although 18-year-olds are technically considered adults, the brain still has a ways to mature and doesn’t stop maturing until the mid-20s, lead author Mary-Louise Risher, post-doctoral research at Duke University, said about the study.

Therefore, young people should be aware that drinking heavily while their brains are developing could result in permanent effects on their brains, and it could have severe impacts on a person’s ability to remember things and learn skills.

Risher and her colleagues came to the conclusion while studying young rodents with developing brains, exposing them to alcohol during their adolescent phase that would result in impairment if a comparable amount were ingested by a human, but not so much that it would cause them to fall asleep.

After being periodically exposed to this amount of alcohol, no more would be administered and the rats would be permitted to grow into adulthood at around 24 to 29 days.

The researchers then sent a small electrical pulse to the hippocampus portion of the brain, which deals with learning and memory, and then they measured how the brain strengthens its synapses as it learns new tasks or attempts to recall things.

They found that alcohol exposure changes the way the hippocampus functions and how the cells even look.

The findings were published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, one in six teens engage in binge drinking, but only one in 100 parents believe that this is the case. In addition, teenage alcohol abuse results in 4,700 deaths each year, which is more than all illegal drugs combined.

Also, teenagers who start drinking at an early age are seven times more likely to be in a car accident involving alcohol, according to MADD.