Older, abstinent alcoholics show intact brain function

By Amy Norton

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older alcoholics who manage to achieve abstinence can have mental functioning on par with other older adults, a small study suggests.

Researchers found that as a group, elderly alcoholics who'd been abstinent for at least 6 months performed as well as older non-alcoholics on standard tests of thinking and memory.

The findings, reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, suggest that older adults who solve their drinking problem can emerge with their cognitive function intact.

The results do not mean, however, that years of heavy drinking do no harm to the brain, the study authors stress. Instead, they suggest that alcoholics who survive to old age with relatively good health may be a hardier lot whose brains are intrinsically more resistant to the damaging effects of alcoholism.

"Our research basically shows that early brain growth may mean the difference between normal functioning and cognitive impairment for abstinent alcoholics in their later years," explained lead study author Dr. George Fein, president of Neurobehavioral Research Inc. in Honolulu.

Specifically, he told Reuters Health, abstinent alcoholics in this study tended to have larger craniums than the comparison group of non-alcoholics, and those with larger craniums -- a marker of a larger brain -- generally performed better on tests of cognitive function.

Fein and colleague Shannon McGillivray speculate that the older alcoholics had a relatively high "brain reserve capacity" -- a reference to the brain's ability to tolerate damage and allow a person to remain cognitively intact for a longer period.

The findings are based on tests of 91 alcoholic men and women, who were an average of 67 years old (age range 58 to 85), and a comparison group of non-drinkers and light drinkers the same age. The length of abstinence among the alcoholics was an average of 14.8 years (range 6 months to 45 years).

The researchers separated the alcoholics into three sub-groups: those who quit drinking before age 50; those who quit in their 50s; and those who quit after age 60.

Overall, Fein's team found, all three groups performed as well or better than the non-alcoholic group on tests of memory, attention, thinking and verbal skills. Only one group -- the abstinent-by-50 group -- performed worse than the comparison group, but only in one of the areas of the cognitive tests that involved memory.

"Our results show that it is possible for some elderly abstinent alcoholics to either have escaped the neurodegenerative effects of alcohol abuse on cognitive function, or to have fully recovered any cognitive function that was lost during active alcoholism," Fein said.

However, he pointed out again that the findings do not imply that all older drinkers who quit will have normal cognitive abilities.

Instead, Fein and McGillivray conclude, "cognitively healthier alcoholics, with more brain reserve capacity, may be more likely to live into their sixties, seventies, or eighties with relatively intact cognition, and to volunteer for studies such as this."

SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, November 2007.