<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> The COVID-19 outbreak and the related lockdown measures have raised concerns regarding mental health, including alcohol misuse. Preliminary studies investigated alcohol consumption at the early stages of lockdown, but no longitudinal data regarding its evolution during and after the first lockdown are currently available. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We investigated changes in alcohol consumption among a convenience sample of 1,693 French-speaking Belgian adults using a 3-stage longitudinal online survey. All participants reported their consumption at different stages of lockdown: before lockdown onset (retrospectively, T0), at 2 different times during lockdown (T1 and T2), and after lockdown offset (T3). We also measured socio-demographic variables and the harmfulness of drinking patterns before lockdown. <b><i>Results:</i></b> A mixed model with negative binomial distribution indicated that participants decreased their alcohol consumption after lockdown onset and returned to their initial alcohol consumption after lockdown offset. Younger individuals (18–30 years old) were more likely to decrease their consumption during the lockdown period (T1 and T2) than the periods preceding or following lockdown (T0 and T3), especially if they presented hazardous or problematic drinking patterns before lockdown. We only observed a rebound effect after lockdown offset among young moderate drinkers. All participants kept stable their alcohol consumption during lockdown (T1 and T2). <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Lockdown onset and offset constitute key periods for alcohol consumption changes during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly in youth and in individuals with hazardous or problematic drinking patterns.
Visuoperceptive impairments are among the most frequently reported deficits in alcohol-use disorders, but only very few studies have investigated their origin and interactions with other categories of dysfunctions. Besides, these deficits have generally been interpreted in a linear bottom-up perspective, which appears very restrictive with respect to the new models of vision developed in healthy populations. Indeed, new theories highlight the predictive nature of the visual system and demonstrate that it interacts with higher-level cognitive functions to generate top-down predictions. These models notably posit that a fast but coarse visual analysis involving magnocellular pathways helps to compute heuristic guesses regarding the identity and affective value of inputs, which are used to facilitate conscious visual recognition. Building on these new proposals, the present review stresses the need to reconsider visual deficits in alcohol-use disorders as they might have crucial significance for core features of the pathology, such as attentional bias, loss of inhibitory control and emotion decoding impairments. Centrally, we suggest that individuals with severe alcohol-use disorders could present with magnocellular damage and we defend a dynamic explanation of the deficits. Rather than being restricted to high-level processes, deficits could start at early visual stages and then extend and potentially intensify during following steps due to reduced cerebral connectivity and dysfunctional cognitive/emotional regions. A new research agenda is specifically provided to test these hypotheses.
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