The goals of this study were to describe demographic variables, drinking history, and the 6-month prevalence of Axis I comorbidity among alcohol-dependent subjects in GERMANY: The variables: amount of alcohol consumption, age at onset of the first alcohol consumed, age at onset of daily alcohol consumption, age at onset of withdrawal symptoms and number of detoxifications were related to the different comorbid disorders and gender. In this study, 556 patients from 25 alcohol treatment centres were enrolled between 1 January 1999 and 30 April 1999. After a minimum of 10 days of sobriety patients who fulfilled ICD-10 and DSM-IV criteria of alcohol dependence were interviewed for data collection using the Mini-DIPS (German version of the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule) and a standardized psychosocial interview. The 6-month prevalence of comorbid Axis I disorders was 53.1%. Among the patients with comorbidity, affective and anxiety disorders were most frequent. Comorbid stress disorder was associated with an early start of drinking, an early beginning of withdrawal symptoms, highest number of detoxifications, and the highest amount of alcohol consumed. Female patients with anxiety disorder consumed more alcohol and started earlier than females without this comorbid disorder. The data do not answer the question of the pathogenesis of comorbid disorders and alcoholism, but indicate that stress disorders in alcoholic patients and anxiety disorders in female alcoholics influence the course and severity of alcoholism.

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Dysfunctions in perceptual timing have been reported in children with ADHD, but so far only from studies that have not used the whole set of timing paradigms available from the literature, with the diversity of findings complicating the development of a unified model of timing dysfunctions and its determinants in ADHD. Therefore, we employed a comprehensive set of paradigms (time discrimination, time estimation, time production, and time reproduction) in order to explore the perceptual timing deficit profile in our ADHD sample. Moreover, we aimed to detect predictors responsible for timing task performance deficits in children with ADHD and how the timing deficits might be positively affected by methylphenidate. Male children with ADHD and healthy control children, all aged between 8 and 13 years, participated in this longitudinal study with three experimental sessions, where children with ADHD were medicated with methylphenidate at the second session but discontinued their medication at the remaining sessions. The results of our study reveal that children with ADHD were impaired in all timing tasks, arguing for a general perceptual timing deficit in ADHD. In doing so, our predictor analyses support the notion that distinct but partially overlapping cognitive mechanisms might exist for discriminating, estimating/producing, and reproducing time intervals. In this sense, working memory deficits in terms of an abnormally fast internal counting process might be common to dysfunctions in the time estimation/time production tasks and in the time reproduction task, with attention deficits (e.g., in terms of disruptions of the counting process) additionally contributing to time estimation/time production deficits and motivational alterations additionally contributing to time reproduction deficits. Methylphenidate did not significantly alter performance of the ADHD sample, presumably due to limited statistical power of our study. The findings of our study demonstrate a pivotal role of disturbed working memory processes in perceptual timing task performance in childhood ADHD, at the same time broadening the view for additional attentional and motivational determinants of impaired task performance.

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