Brain-age quotients in recently detoxified alcoholic, recovered alcoholic and nonalcoholic women

Abstract

Examined performance of three matched groups (N = 35 each) of female alcoholics (average sobriety 1 month), female recovered alcoholics (average sobriety 1 year), and female nonalcoholic controls on the Brain‐Age Quotient (BAQ), an age‐adjusted index of cerebral dysfunction. The mean BAQs of the alcoholics and recovered alcoholics were significantly lower than that of the controls. Analyses of the BAQ subtests indicated that the alcoholics performed significantly less well than the controls on the Halstead Category Test, Tactual Performance Test‐Time, WAIS Block Design and WAIS Digit Symbol, which replicates findings with male alcoholics. The recovered alcoholics performed at the alcoholic level on WAIS Block Design and Digit Symbol and performed at the control level on the Halstead Category test; which suggests a differential recovery of cognitive abilities in abstinent female alcoholics.

Cognitive impairment among the dually‐diagnosed: substance use history and depressive symptom correlates

“…The significant effects of alcohol use on abstract reasoning/problem solving skills as assessed by the SILS replicate previous studies (e.g. Loberg, 1980;Wilkinson & Carlen, 1980;Parsons & Farr, 1981;Silberstein & Parsons, 1981;Hochla, Fabian & Parsons, 1982;Nathan, 1990) that have examined the impact of alcohol use and drinking patterns on various cognitive and neuropsychological indices among various populations. The present results also extend previous research by demonstrating independent effects for both life-time alcohol use and previous month's alcohol use depending upon the classification criterion employed.…”

Improvement in memory and static balance with abstinence in alcoholic men and women: Selective relations with change in brain structure

“…One study (Bates et al, 2005) found a clinically significant, moderate effect size for change in memory in a large sample of alcoholics retested 6 weeks after entering treatment, whereas another (Mann et al, 1999) found no evidence for treatment-related improvements in memory tests after a comparable interval in a sample of 49 alcoholic men even though improvement occurred in other functional domains. Cross-sectional studies have shown that alcoholics sober for several months (Sullivan et al, 2000d;Sullivan et al, 2002;Meyerhoff, 2005;Rosenbloom et al, 2005), one year (Hochla et al, 1982;Parsons et al, 1990;Munro et al, 2000;Rosenbloom et al, 2004), or as long as seven years (Brandt et al, 1983) may still show memory deficits relative to non-alcoholic controls. However, other crosssectional studies have shown that performance on memory tests is related to length of abstinence (Joyce and Robbins, 1993;Oscar-Berman et al, 2004), and that alcoholics sober for more than 4 years are undistinguishable from controls on memory testing (Grant et al, 1984;Reed et al, 1992;Oscar-Berman et al, 2004;Fein et al, 2006).…”

Frontal Callosal Fiber Integrity Selectively Predicts Coordinated Psychomotor Performance in Chronic Alcoholism

“…Patients with alcoholism are commonly impaired on the DS (Beatty et al 2000;Davies et al 2005;Harris et al 2003;Hochla et al 1982;Sullivan et al 2002a;Sullivan et al 2000), as are many patients with any brain dysfunction. Although DS was not designed as an interhemispheric transfer task, coordination of the executive, visuospatial, motor, and mnemonic processes is required to perform the DS test successfully (Glosser et al 1977;Joy et al 2000Joy et al , 2003aKaplan et al 1991) and likely invokes frontally-based systems and interhemispheric communication.…”