Supervisory attentional system in nonamnesic alcoholic men

Background: Many studies have shown that recently detoxified alcoholic pers ons perform poorly on tasks thought to be sensitive to frontal lobe damage, supporting the hypothesis that the frontal lobes are highly vulnerable to chronic alcohol consumption. However, it appeared that most of the executiv e tasks used in these studies also involved nonexecutive components, and th ese tasks had been shown to be impaired as a result of nonfrontal lobe lesi ons. In this study, we examined further the "frontal lobe vulnerability" hy pothesis using executive tasks, proved to be associated with frontal lobe f unctioning, that allowed us to distinguish the relative importance of execu tive and nonexecutive processes. Method: Thirty recently detoxified asymptomatic male alcoholic inpatients a nd 30 control subjects were tested for planning, inhibition, rule detection , and coordination of dual task, as well as the speed of processing and non executive functions (such as Short-term memory storage). Results: Alcoholics performed worse than controls in almost all tasks asses sing executive functions. However, they were not slower than the controls a nd showed normal results for nonexecutive functions. Conclusions: Chronic alcohol consumption seems to be associated with severe executive function deficits, which are still present after a protracted pe riod of alcohol abstinence. These data support the idea that the cognitive deficits in recently detoxified sober alcoholic subjects are due, at least partly, to frontal lobe dysfunctioning.