The Collage Impression Scoring Scale (CISS; Imamura, 2004) was used by 54 raters to score collages made by 24 alcoholics on admission to the hospital and at discharge. The CISS contains three factors: stability, expression and creativity. Comparisons using paired t-tests showed that the collages made at discharge had lower scores on the three CISS factors than the collages made on admission. Th...

Over the past 55 years, two longitudinal studies have been monitoring the drinking behaviors and their consequences of several hundred men from adolescence and early adulthood to old age. The studies identified co-occurring sociopathy, cultural factors (e.g., ethnicity), and genetic factors (i.e., a family history of alcoholism) as risk factors for alcoholism. In most alcoholics, the disease ha...

Alcoholics frequently suffer from infectious diseases and have increased rates of some cancers, indicating that alcohol impairs the immune system, which protects the body against this type of damage. Alcohol interferes with the functions of many of the cells and molecules that are part of the immune system. For example, alcohol inhibits the functions of the cells that ingest and destroy invadin...

Excessive alcohol consumption and abuse are widely observed around the world and contribute to high health care and social costs in developed as well as in developing countries (1,2). Excessive consumption of alcohol may lead to a variety of gastrointestinal, neurologic, cardiovascular and malignant diseases, being also a high-risk factor in all causes of death (3-5). However, alcohol related d...