Parsons O A
Oklahoma Center for Alcohol and Drug-Related Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City 73104, USA.
Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 1998 Jun;22(4):954-61.
Our research program has investigated neurocognitive deficits in sober alcoholics for several decades. We have shown that both male and female adult alcoholics--compared with peer nonalcoholic controls--have deficits on tests of learning, memory, abstracting, problem-solving, perceptual analysis and synthesis, speed of information processing, and efficiency. The deficits are equivalent to those found in patients with known brain dysfunction of a mild to moderate nature. Attempts to identify factors other than alcoholism to account for these differences have been unsuccessful. The deficits appear to remit slowly over 4 to 5 years. Relapse of recovering alcoholics is predicted by behavioral (e.g., depressive symptoms and neurocognitive performance) and biological measures (e.g., event-related potentials) obtained at the end of treatment. Results of recent studies support the hypothesis of a continuum of neurocognitive deficits ranging from the severe deficits found in Korsakoff patients to moderate deficits found in alcoholics and moderate to mild deficits in heavy social drinkers (more than 21 drinks/week). Individual differences in the presence and magnitude of neurocognitive deficits in social drinkers and alcoholics are hypothesized to be due, in part, to individual differences in vulnerability of the brain to alcohol or its metabolites' toxic effects.
我们的研究项目几十年来一直在调查清醒的酗酒者的神经认知缺陷。我们已经表明，与同龄非酗酒对照组相比，成年男性和女性酗酒者在学习、记忆、抽象、解决问题、感知分析与综合、信息处理速度和效率测试中均存在缺陷。这些缺陷与在患有轻度至中度已知脑功能障碍的患者中发现的缺陷相当。试图找出除酗酒之外的其他因素来解释这些差异的尝试均未成功。这些缺陷似乎在4至5年内缓慢缓解。通过治疗结束时获得的行为（如抑郁症状和神经认知表现）和生物学指标（如事件相关电位）可以预测戒酒者的复发情况。最近的研究结果支持了神经认知缺陷连续体的假说，该连续体范围从科尔萨科夫综合征患者中发现的严重缺陷到酗酒者中的中度缺陷以及重度社交饮酒者（每周饮酒超过21杯）中的中度至轻度缺陷。社交饮酒者和酗酒者中神经认知缺陷的存在和程度的个体差异被推测部分归因于大脑对酒精或其代谢产物毒性作用的易感性的个体差异。
