Further evidence for a continuum-of-impairment encompassing male alcoholic Korsakoff patients and chronic alcoholic men.

A battery of challening tests was used to assess learning ability and short-term memory in groups of detoxified chronic alcoholics with and without complaints of memory impairment, alcoholic Korsakoff patients, and nonalcoholic controls. While alcoholics without memory complaints did not differ from controls on standardized clinical memory tests, their performance was significantly impaired on our more demanding experimental tests. In contrast, the performance of alcoholics reporting memory complaints was impaired, relative to the other alcoholics, on both clinical and experimental memory tests, overlapping that of the alcoholig Korsakoff patients. These results are consonant with Ryback's continuum-of-impairment hypothesis.