Study Could Change Treatment
of Alcoholism

New findings by Rice psychologists could presage a change in the way therapists treat alcohol-dependent patients. They discovered that, in some cases, traditional therapy requires certain cognitive skills, such as abstract thinking, that alcohol-dependent patients initially may be incapable of performing.

“Studies have shown that alcoholics have problems with executive functions—those that have to do with such cognitive tasks as working memory, problem solving, and abstract thinking,” says Geoffrey Potts, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rice and principal author of “Frontal Deficits in Alcoholism: An ERP Study,” published in Brain and Cognition.

Potts, Rice postdoctoral fellow Mary “Reeni” George, and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, have shown that alcohol-dependent patients seem to have brain malfunctions similar to those of patients who have structural damage to the frontal lobe. “The responses we got from subjects in our study,” Potts says, “indicate that alcohol-dependent patients are more similar to people with frontal lesions than to patients with subcortical damage, both in their brain waves and in their task performance.”

The frontal lobe is the most advanced part of the brain and is credited with such functions as attention, problem solving, memory, judgment, impulse control, and regulating social behavior. Subcortical areas, on the other hand, are involved in more primitive functions, such as some aspects of emotions, certain motor functions, and the regulation of thirst, hunger, and body temperature.

The researchers tested four groups of subjects using a modified version of the Petrides and Milner Number Sequencing task. All of the subjects were recruited from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences. The alcohol-dependent patients had an average drinking history of six years and were detoxified before taking part in the study. The subjects with subcortical lesions were stroke patients, and those with frontal lobe lesions were either stroke patients or had recovered from tumor resections. The control group consisted of paid adult volunteers who had no prior history of substance use or neurological disorders.

Through electroencephalograph recordings, the researchers measured changes in the patients’ brain waves before and during the number sequencing test. The study found that the ability to recall a sequence of numbers was much lower for frontal lesion patients and the alcohol-dependent group than for the subcortical lesion group or the control group. In addition, both the alcohol-dependent and frontal lobe patients had similar abnormal brainwave activity, while the subcortical patients had brain activity more like the control participants.

Such findings may be critically important for therapists who treat alcohol-dependent patients, since traditional therapy requires skills that the patients initially may not have. “In dealing with patients who have a known deficit,” Potts says, “you first have to identify where they are having problems in case they need special help or training to overcome those deficits. When designing treatment for alcohol- dependent patients, for example, it would be important to know they may have working memory deficits as our study has shown.”

—B. J. Almond