Addiction Hurts Women Neuropsychologically Almost The Same As It Hurts Men.

2002 FEB 14 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Although women are less likely than men to abuse alcohol, those that do suffer the same kinds of neuropsychological problems as alcoholic men, according to a new study published in the January 2002 issue of Neuropsychology.

And, the problems, including impaired working memory and visuospatial abilities, remain months after alcoholic women stop drinking.

With this research, a team from Stanford University and consulting company SRI International's Neuroscience Program (based in Menlo Park, California) has further clarified sex differences in alcoholism, which affects about 4.6 million U.S. women (about one third of the estimated U.S. alcohol-abusing or alcohol-dependent population).

Scientists have known how alcoholism damages the nervous system (including the brain) for decades, but primarily in men for two reasons. First, early researchers studied patients at Veterans Administration hospitals, far more likely to be men; second, more men than women abuse alcohol. Once the medical community found that research on men does not necessarily generalize across the sexes, they began to study the effects of alcoholism on women, and found some significant differences. For one, although women drink less than men and are less likely to use or abuse alcohol, death rates among alcoholic women are 50-100% higher than among their male counterparts. This higher mortality may be related to other sex differences, including the facts that women exhibit more psychiatric problems than men and metabolize alcohol differently from men, this last perhaps in part due to women's higher body fat.

The current research was intended to assess any possible sex differences in alcoholism-related neuropsychological performance, because knowledge of how (and if) alcohol differentially affects women can inform how the disease can be prevented, diagnosed, and treated.

Edith V. Sullivan, PhD, Rosemary Fama, PhD, Margaret J. Rosenbloom, PhD, and Adolf Pfefferbaum, PhD, studied a range of neuropsychological deficits in 43 alcoholic women who were sober, on average, for 3.6 months, and compared their performance with that of a nonalcoholic control group. The team assessed such abilities as executive function (for example, sequencing and sorting cards); short-term memory and fluency (remembering letter or block combinations; producing as many words as possible that start with a given letter); visuospatial abilities (tracing simple figures embedded in complex figures, copying complex designs, or building with blocks to match pictured designs); upper-limb motor ability (grip strength and fine finger movement), and gait and balance. These abilities have been associated with particular areas of the brain, such as executive function with the frontal lobes and gait and ...