A Prospective Study of Young Men at High Risk for Alcoholism: Neuropsychological Assessment

Abstract

As part of the first phase of a prospective longitudinal study on alcoholism, a battery of neuropsychological tests covering general intelligence, memory, attention, field-dependence, categorizing ability, and organizing and planning, was administered to 204 18-19-year-old males. Of these, 134 subjects are the sons of alcoholic fathers and are thereby themselves at high risk for becoming alcoholic. The remaining 70 subjects comprise a control group matched for several social and familial variables. The high risk group was found to have a relatively poorer vocabulary and to perform worse on tests of categorizing ability and organization and planning. All of these findings concur with other results from this study. The anticipated future alcoholics from among the high risk subjects may prove to be those who differed most on these tests.

Lateral Asymmetries in the Frontal Brain: Effects of Depression and a Family History of Alcoholism in Female Adolescents

“…vated by the task. In addition, the present results are highly consistent with previously published work that suggests left frontal dysfunction (Drejer et al, 1985) in subjects with a family history of alcoholism and right frontal dysfunction in subjects with depressed affect. It is perhaps incorrect to assert that these lateral regions are exclusively impaired in subjects with depression or a family history of alcoholism.…”

Event-Related Oscillations in Offspring of Alcoholics: Neurocognitive Disinhibition as a Risk for Alcoholism

“…This view is strengthened by our finding that the OA group has a weaker fronto-parietal interaction as observed in the topography of slow alpha activity (8-9 Hz) (see Figure 4). It is also known that children of alcoholics, similar to adult alcoholics, manifest neuropsychological or cognitive deficits that precede the onset of alcoholism (Schaeffer et al 1984;Drejer et al 1985;Tarter et al 1989;Pihl et al 1990, Pihl andBruce 1995;Peterson et al 1992;Knop et al 1993). Therefore, we propose that the neuro-cognitive deficits observed in the OA group, as elicited by decreased P3 amplitude and weaker oscillatory responses in low frequency bands perhaps predispose these high risk individuals to develop alcoholism and related disorders.…”

Do Premorbid Predictors of Alcohol Dependence Also Predict the Failure to Recover From Alcoholism?

“…The premorbid screening measures included 45 measures from the perinatal phase; 87 measures from the early schoolage phase; 176 variables from interviews completed by a physician, a social worker, and a psychologist at the lateadolescent follow-up phase; as well as 33 measures from a neuropsychological test battery and 15 from an alcohol challenge test also obtained at the late-adolescent follow-up. These premorbid measures were previously used to compare high-risk and low-risk subjects, the results of which have been reported elsewhere (Drejer et al, 1985;Knop, 1985;Pollock et al, 1983Pollock et al, , 1986Volavka et al, 1996).…”

“…An intelligence test (Borge Priens Prove) administered by the Danish military draft board (Mortensen et al, 1989), obtained when the subjects signed up for this obligatory service in their late teens or early 20s, was also included in this fi nal set of variables despite the fact that the military IQ did not signifi cantly distinguish subjects who would become alcohol-dependent later in life (p = .53). The military IQ was included because risk was signifi cantly associated with many measures in the neuropsychological test battery administered premorbidly (Drejer et al, 1985) and because general measures of intellectual functioning correlate strongly with a great number of social and behavioral outcomes (Batty et al, 2007;Gottfredson, 1998). Premorbid items that predicted both alcohol dependence and remission status were examined in a correlation matrix for redundancy and other features.…”