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Millions of college students and high schoolers join in spring break fun each March. But University of Florida experts say the heavy drinking that often happens on break can do damage that persists well past the next morning's hangover. Doctors say repeated binge drinking can lead to brain injury that lasts weeks, even months after the party's over. In college- age revelers, cognitive impairment as well as concentration and sleep problems can result from excessive drinking. While experts do know that one-third of college students have abused alcohol at one time or another, little is know about the side effects that can strike individual partiers.

Dr. Scott Teitelbaum / UF psychiatrist

"When somebody abuses drugs or alcohol, you can't pick the consequences that are going to happen. And I think the population really underestimates the injury that one does to one's brain with repeated or binge exposure to alcohol and/or drugs."

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Addiction experts also warn that more and more young partygoers are abusing prescription drugs such as painkillers and tranquilizers. And when taken in combination with alcohol, or even alone, these powerful medications can prove deadly. College students who get their hands on powerful pain relievers like methadone or OxyContin assume they're safe because they're a prescribed drug. But coroners' data in Florida for 2005, for example, showed that methadone was second behind cocaine in drug-related deaths.

Dr. Scott Teitelbaum / UF psychiatrist

"If you look at the percentage of kids that engage in binge drinking and then you combine that with the percentage of young people that are taking, without medical supervision, tranquilizers and opiates, that is why you have all of these tragedies."

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At the University of Florida Health Science Center, I'm Mike Garrison