Alcohol consumption’s effects on working memory: Examining familial confounding.

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of our study was to provide a more rigorous test of the causal hypothesis that chronic alcohol use impairs working memory performance. Method: We measured linear associations between a latent factor representing alcohol consumption and accuracy across four working memory tasks before and after accounting for familial confounding using a cotwin control design. Specifically, this study examined accuracy through a latent working memory score, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox List Sorting, NIH Toolbox Picture Sequence, Penn Word Memory, and 2-back tasks. The study included data from 158 dizygotic and 278 monozygotic twins (M age = 29 ± 3 years). Results: In our initial sample-wide analysis, we did not detect any statistically significant associations between alcohol use and working memory accuracy. However, our cotwin control analyses showed that twins with greater levels of alcohol use exhibited worse scores on the latent working memory composite measure (B = −.25, CI [−.43, −.08], p < .01), Picture Sequence (B = −.31, CI [−.55, −.08], p < .01), and List Sorting (B = −.28, CI [−.51, −.06 ], p = .01) tasks than did their cotwins.Conclusions: These results are consistent with a potentially causal relationship between alcohol use and working memory performance that can be detected only after accounting for confounding familial factors. This highlights the importance of understanding the mechanisms that may underlie negative associations between alcohol use and cognitive performance, as well as the potential factors that influence both alcohol behaviors and cognition. Public Health Significance StatementThis study found a significant association between greater alcohol use and worse working memory performance that could only be detected after accounting for genetic and shared environmental confounding. This may be consistent with a causal impact of alcohol on cognition that can be obscured by factors that differ between families.