Results from a clinical study conducted at Duke University Medical Center indicate that alcoholics who have recently stopped drinking still have higher-level thinking impairment. The DUMC team, which released the results in September, hoped the study’s findings will have an impact on treatment strategies for recovering alcoholics.
“In the long run, the question we are trying to answer is, are there some people [so] impaired due to alcohol consumption that they really can’t make good use of the clinical treatment and therapy we offer,” said Dr. Roy Stein, study collaborator and clinical associate in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “[We want to] identify those people and bolster their treatment to compensate for it.”
The DUMC team tested 27 male veterans who had been in alcohol treatment at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Researchers asked the patients questions about their cognitive abilities like, “Do you believe your thinking is as good as it’s always been?” The DUMC team also subjected the patients to a variety of mental tests for verbal and non-verbal memory and abstract reasoning skills. The investigators then compared these results to those of the non-alcoholic control group, which took the same tests.
“We took a look at how people recover after they stop drinking, how long cognitive impairment lasts, and to what degree it’s reversible,” said Dr. Scott Swartzwelder, senior author of the study.
The researchers noted lower scores for the recovering alcoholics than non-alcoholics on some cognitive and memory tests. Additionally, recovering alcoholics considered themselves worse thinkers in response to the investigators’ questions. The study did not, however, show a strong correlation between the amount of time an alcoholic had been abstinent to test scores.
“The answer is, we don’t know from this study what the interaction of age might be with frontal lobe deficit,” Swartzwelder said. “Presumably when people get older they have frontal lobe deficit anyways—combine that with alcohol, you might get more damage.” The frontal lobe is the area of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking such as planning, persistence and abstract thinking.
A major limitation of the study, however, is that the alcoholics tested had lower IQ scores than the subjects in the control group. Since IQ is an intelligence test that should not change with chronic alcohol use, these recovering alcoholics could have had a lower intelligence unrelated to drinking. In addition, the study’s sample size was not large and conclusions can not be extended to other populations such as women, as the study’s scope was confined to only males. The DUMC team is currently planning a follow-up study for sometime within the next year.
Although the student drinking population at Duke and other universities do not have the drinking history that the patients in the study had, researchers believe that the acute effects of short-term alcohol abuse resemble the chronic effects of long-term consumption.
“When people drink heavily, they do compromise frontal function—every time you drink it,” Swartzwelder said. “The bottom line is, the same kind of frontal lobe deficits we see in patients in treatment we see the same thing in acute function. The brain is still developing in college years—it might be more easy to produce the same damage in those years.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.