AIMS While psychiatric symptoms are common in the general population and even more prevalent in alcoholics, their clinical implications are not clear. The goal of this study was to establish the life-time rates of several independent and concurrent mood and anxiety disorders in alcoholics, controls and their relatives. DESIGN Structured interviews were administered to alcoholics entering trea...

Alcoholism is a disease that often goes undiagnosed and untreated. The current treatment results of alcoholism are far from satisfactory. One reason for this situation is that there is extensive heterogeneity among alcoholics. Cloninger’s typology divides alcoholics into two subgroups: late-onset, anxiety-prone type 1 alcoholics and early-onset, impulsive type 2 alcoholics. The composition of t...

The definition of alcoholism has long been marked by uncertainty and conflict, yet no better term exists to describe chronic and dependent overconsumption. Alcohol is drunk mostly for its pharmacological effects on the central nervous system (CNS), and when dependence sets in, consumption is increased because of tolerance and the need to avoid withdrawal symptoms. The effects on the CNS include...

OBJECTIVE It is unknown why most amoebic liver abscess (ALA) cases occur in alcohol drinkers. In experimental studies, the presence of 'iron' potentiates the in-vitro growth of Entamoeba histolytica (E. histolytica), and is also known to increase its in-vivo invasiveness in animal infections. Chronic alcoholism increases the hepatic iron deposition. We hypothesized that ALA occurs more commonly...

In this paper, several improvements are proposed to previous work of automated classification of alcoholics and nonalcoholics. In the previous paper, multiplayer-perceptron neural network classifying energy of gamma band Visual Evoked Potential (VEP) signals gave the best classification performance using 800 VEP signals from 10 alcoholics and 10 non-alcoholics. Here, the dataset is extended to ...

AIMS Data on recovery from hormonal and metabolic sequelae of alcoholism in strictly controlled alcohol abstinence are mainly restricted to short-term abstention. Our previous findings of persistently decreased plasma and urinary urea concentrations in long-term abstinent alcoholics prompted us to further elucidate this unexplained phenomenon. METHODS The response of circulating urea cycle me...

The default mode network (DMN) comprises brain structures maximally active at rest. Disturbance of network nodes or their connections occurs with some neuropsychiatric conditions and may underlie associated dysfunction. DMN connectivity has not been examined in alcoholism, which is marked by compromised DMN nodes and impaired spatial working memory. To test whether performance would be related ...

To investigate whether sodium sensitivity of blood pressure participates in the relationship of arterial hypertension to chronic alcohol consumption, 30 alcoholics detoxified from 6 to 12 months and 30 teetotaler controls underwent a dietary sodium manipulation study. They received a daily 55 mmol sodium diet for 7 days, followed by a 260 mmol sodium diet for 7 days. Changes in 24-hour urinary ...