Chronic active heavy drinking and family history of problem drinking modulate regional brain tissue volumes

Non-treatment-seeking heavy drinkers: Effects of chronic cigarette smoking on brain structure

“…Participants in this report and Cardenas et al (2005) were originally recruited for a larger longitudinal study of the central nervous system effects of HIV and AUD. From the 49 actively drinking HD participants in Cardenas et al (2005), we identified 17 smoking HD (sHD; 3 females) who reported smoking daily (n = 10) or nearly everyday (n = 7) for at least 6 months prior to enrolment in the study.…”

“…From the 49 actively drinking HD participants in Cardenas et al (2005), we identified 17 smoking HD (sHD; 3 females) who reported smoking daily (n = 10) or nearly everyday (n = 7) for at least 6 months prior to enrolment in the study. We focused on individuals with the greatest smoking frequency and did not include sporadic smokers.…”

“…138, 115−130] that non-treatment-seeking, active heavy drinkers (HD) demonstrated smaller regional neocortical gray matter volumes compared to light drinking controls; however, the potential effects of chronic cigarette smoking on regional brain volumes were not addressed. The goal of this retrospective analysis was to determine if chronic smoking affected brain structure in the non-treatment-seeking heavy drinking sample from our earlier report (i.e., Cardenas et al, 2005). Regional volumetric comparisons were made among age-matched smoking HD (n = 17), non-smoking HD (n = 16), and non-smoking light drinkers (nsLD; n = 20) from our original sample.…”

“…Therefore, morphological findings obtained for treatment-seeking alcoholics may not necessarily generalize to treatment-naïve individuals. To further address this issue, we studied treatment-naïve, community-dwelling active heavy drinkers with high-resolution quantitative magnetic resonance imaging and observed that chronic and excessive alcohol consumption in these individuals was associated with cerebral morphological abnormalities (Cardenas et al, 2005). Specifically, treatmentnaïve, active heavy drinkers demonstrated smaller regional cortical gray matter (GM) volumes compared to light drinking controls.…”

“…Therefore, it is possible that chronic smoking in our cohort of active heavy social drinkers is also associated with a similar pattern of regional tissue dysmorphology evidenced by our treatment-seeking alcoholics. Thus, the primary goal of this retrospective analysis was to determine the potential influence of chronic cigarette smoking on regional GM and WM volumes in the non-treatment-seeking, heavy drinking community-based sample described in Cardenas et al (2005).…”