Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Problems Linger for Recovering Alcoholics
Health Day News story reprinted at Yahoo - "Even with prolonged sobriety, alcoholics can have problems with visual perception and frontal executive brain function, which can make it hard for them to do things such as read maps or put together puzzles, according to a study in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Researchers compared 51 recently detoxified alcoholic men with 63 non-alcoholic men. Men in both groups were asked to complete a picture fragment identification task, assessing their ability to identify line drawings of common objects or animals when they were only partially visible. Compared to the men in the control group, the alcoholic men had to see more of a complete image before they could identify the animals or object, the researchers report."