Stopping alcohol can restore some cognitive function

Undoing alcohol's damage to the mind, by Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, Dec 25 2006.

[A] new study published in the journal Brain details the remarkable ability of the thinking organ to regenerate itself and regain function when its host chooses the path of sobriety. The research also underscores a key warning — quit now, or risk damage that could be harder to reverse....

Those studies have established that alcoholism can cause significant loss of short-term memory skills and of higher-order functions such as reasoning, planning and prioritizing. In adults as well as adolescents, alcohol abuse was associated with changes in the brain — in particular in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher reasoning.

The most well-documented alcohol-related impairments occur in a drinker's visual-spatial skills — those that allow us to drive, read a map and orient ourselves in three-dimensional space. A Stanford University study published in August found that although middle-aged alcoholics who had been abstinent for as little as six months regained virtually all lost function on measures of abstraction, attention, memory, reaction time and verbal skills, the damage to their visual-spatial skills was not so easily undone.

Studies have found that women are particularly vulnerable to the cognitive effects of alcoholism, and that smoking tobacco during recovery can significantly hamper the brain's process of self-repair.

The study is in the Dec. 18 online edition of the journal Brain.

technorati tags:alcohol, smoking, cognition, tobacco, visuospatial, brain, addiction, substance, alcoholism, mind