Schottenbauer Michele A, Momenan Reza, Kerick Michael, Hommer Daniel W
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Neuropsychology. 2007 May;21(3):337-45. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.21.3.337.
The current article examined the relationships among aging, intelligence, intracranial volume, and brain shrinkage in alcoholics and nonalcoholic controls. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure intracranial and cerebral volumes in 146 subjects with alcohol use disorders and 42 comparison subjects who were not alcoholic. The authors' findings show that performance on Block Design decreases as alcoholics age, and this decrease is predicted by brain shrinkage. This is consistent with a process of cumulative brain damage related to alcohol use. However, the authors' data also show that vocabulary does not decrease with age and is correlated with premorbid brain size as measured by intracranial volume, suggesting that lower verbal ability precedes heavy alcohol use and may be a risk factor for alcoholism.
本文研究了酗酒者和非酗酒对照者的衰老、智力、颅内体积和脑萎缩之间的关系。采用磁共振成像测量了146名酒精使用障碍患者和42名非酗酒对照者的颅内和脑体积。作者的研究结果表明，随着酗酒者年龄增长，积木设计测试的表现会下降，而这种下降可由脑萎缩预测。这与酒精使用相关的累积性脑损伤过程一致。然而，作者的数据还表明，词汇量不会随年龄增长而下降，且与通过颅内体积测量的病前脑大小相关，这表明较低的语言能力先于大量饮酒出现，可能是酗酒的一个风险因素。
