offices of the Wessex Council on Alcoholism, 14 Brunswick Place, Southampton, a group of people meet to discuss the difficulties they encounter in fighting an insidious disease that is threatening to ruin their lives?alcoholism. Any non-alcoholics attending would undoubtedly be surprised by the questions asked by these anxious and often apprehensive addicts. Questions that range from a middle-a...

These studies test the hypothesis that acute and chronic alcohol intoxication stimulate the release of oxygen-derived radicals in the liver. Male Sprague-Dawley rats received an intravenous bolus followed by continuous infusion of ethanol to maintain blood alcohol level at about 175 mg/dl for 0-18 hr. They were then allowed to recover from this "alcohol binge" and the release of free radicals d...

Gluteal compartment syndrome is a relatively rare condition that mostly result from atraumatic causes such as prolonged immobilization due to drug abuse or alcoholic intoxication and incorrect positioning during surgical procedures rather than traumatic causes. Early diagnosis is difficult and sometimes delayed or overlooked because of poor physical signs resulting from altered mental status an...

In 1948 the World Health Organisation included alcoholism itself, as distinct from alcoholic psychoses and acute alcohol poisoning, in the International Classification of Disease. Eight years later the American Medical Association declared in a formal statement that alcoholism was a disease, and in 1960 Jellinek' published his influential book The Disease Concept of Alcoholism. These events wer...

College drinking has traditionally been studied from a public health perspective that attempts to quantify behavior as a means toward description, explanation, and intervention. This article offers a critical and cultural approach to understanding the meanings and functions of high-risk drinking and the ways in which those meanings are reproduced within the culture. Data were collected via an e...

In this paper we describe a perception experiment on intoxicated and sober speech of 161 speakers recorded in the German Alcohol Language Corpus. 72 listeners achieved an average discrimination rate of 63.1% when asked to choose from pairs of stimuli which one sounded intoxicated. Perception results were not gender-dependent and no hidden effects were found in a control group test. Since earlie...

This paper uses a simple framework to describe optimal penalties for drunk driving, and reviews available data to judge current policies against this standard. The analysis suggests that policies should be designed so that the penalties paid by drunk drivers equal the value of the increased risks drunk drivers impose on others. Current penalties appear to be too lenient, implying that current l...

The ALC sub-challenge of the Interspeech Speaker State Challenge (ISSC) aims at the automatic classification of speech signals into intoxicated and sober speech. In this context we conducted a perception experiment on data derived from the same corpus to analyze the human performance on the same task. The results show that human still outperform comparable baseline results of ISSC. Female and m...

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...