Cortical gray matter loss in treatment-naive alcohol dependent individuals

被引:157
作者
Fein, G
Di Sclafani, V
Cardenas, VA
Goldmann, H
Tolou-Shams, M
Meyerhoff, DJ
机构
[1] Neurobehav Res Inc, Corte Madera, CA USA
[2] Univ Calif San Francisco, MR Unit, DVA Med Ctr, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
[3] Univ Calif San Francisco, Dept Radiol, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
[4] Univ Leipzig, Dept Med, Leipzig, Germany
[5] Univ Illinois, Dept Psychol, Chicago, IL USA
关键词
MRI; alcoholic; atrophy; cortical; frontal lobe;
D O I
10.1111/j.1530-0277.2002.tb02574.x
中图分类号
R194 [卫生标准、卫生检查、医药管理];
学科分类号
摘要
Background: Most studies of the impact of alcohol dependence on the brain have examined individuals it., treatment. Such samples represent a small proportion of alcoholics in the general population. Such samples may embody a bias (Berkson's fallacy) if the association between variables (for example, alcoholism and cortical gray matter loss) differs between the population of alcoholics in treatment and alcoholics in the general population. Our objective was to determine if treatment-naive alcoholics show structural brain changes versus controls and to compare our findings with reports evaluating alcoholic samples drawn from treatment populations. Methods: Structural MRI was used to assess whole brain and regional volumes of cortical gray matter and white matter in 24 young to middle-aged treatment-naive alcohol-dependent males versus 17 controls. Results: Cortical gray matter volumes in alcohol-dependent individuals were negatively associated with age and lifetime duration of alcohol use (which were highly confounded). These subjects showed reduced whole brain (p < 0.05), prefrontal (p < 0.01), and parietal (p < 0.05) cortical gray matter compared with controls. White matter and temporal cortex, tissues that usually show volume reductions in samples drawn from treatment, did not differ between treatment-naive alcoholics and controls (all p > 0.40). Conclusions: Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that structural brain changes in treatment-naive alcoholics are less severe than those reported in clinical samples of alcoholics, perhaps due to less concomitant psychopathology and a reduced severity of alcoholism in treatment-naive alcoholics. However, caution must be taken when comparing our findings with results from clinical samples, as we did not directly compare treatment-naive alcoholics with treated alcoholics and our treatment-naive sample tended to be younger than the (clinical) samples reported in the literature. Nevertheless, we suggest that most of the reports of the central nervous system consequences of alcoholism may not accurately describe the majority of alcoholic-dependent individuals.
引用
收藏
页码:558 / 564
页数:7
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