Alcoholism - can the neurocognitive defects associated be resolved by long-term abstinence?
A new study has looked at alcoholics who have been sober for 6 months to 13 years - and the results indicate that long-term abstinent alcoholics can recover many - but not all - of their neurocognitive deficits.
“We found that the cognitive and mental abilities of middle-aged alcoholics who had been abstinent for six months to 13 years are indistinguishable from those of age and gender comparable non-alcoholics,” said George Fein, president of and senior scientist at Neurobehavioral Research, “with the possible exception of spatial processing abilities”.
However, Fein continued, “we cannot definitively say that these individuals had deficits when they stopped drinking. We don’t have data on this. Furthermore, these people were middle-aged. We’re not saying that you will have full recovery if you stop drinking in your 50s or 60s; we are saying that these people stopped drinking earlier, and they appear to have close-to-full recovery function.”