The brains of alcoholics are smaller and less dense than people who drink rarely or never. For example, the frontal lobe, the part responsible for abstract thinking, planning, persistence, and other higher-level thinking often does not work as well in alcoholics. Most people who quit drinking recover over time, though some functions, such as memory, may never be quite the same. For addicts who have recently stopped drinking and are in recovery programs, not being able to think straight could make it harder to get through treatment. Researchers at Duke University looked at the cognitive abilities of people who recently decided to treat their drinking problems, to see whether their brains bounced back quickly after alcohol abuse.

What the researchers wanted to know: Is higher-level thinking impaired in alcoholics who have recently stopped drinking?

What they did: The researchers tested 27 male veterans who had been in alcohol treatment for a week or less at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Carolina. They asked the participants a series of questions about their mental abilities, such as "Do you believe your thinking is as good as it's always been?" and gave them cognitive tests, such as one which asked them to think of as many words as they could beginning with a certain letter. They also gave the participants IQ tests and questioned them about how long they had been sober and for how long prior to treatment they had used alcohol. They compared the test results from the recovering alcoholics with 19 nonalcoholics who were given the same tests.

What they found: The alcoholics who had just started recovery had lower scores on some cognitive tests than nonalcoholics, especially on timed tests that included more than one mental component. On both verbal and nonverbal memory tests, alcohol dependent participants scored lower than the control group. Recovering alcoholics also perceived themselves as worse thinkers: 85 percent said their thinking was worse than it used to be, in contrast to 44 percent of the controls who said the same thing. The amount of time since an alcoholic's last drink mattered in only one of the 15 cognitive tests administered, which measured nonverbal abstract reasoning.

What it means to you: Not only is drinking bad for your brain, but the success of recovery programs depends in large part on how well your brain works, according to the authors of the study. People who run these programs, alcoholics' families, and those who are recovering need to be aware that alcoholics may not be able to think as clearly or quickly as others or as the alcoholics themselves once did.

Caveats: The recovering alcoholics in this study had significantly lower IQ scores than people in the control group. Since IQ is thought to be a relatively stable predictor of intelligence potential, it should not change with chronic alcohol use, and could mean that these alcoholics had a lower intelligence that had nothing to do with their drinking. However, portions of the data in combination with other studies raise questions about how stable IQ actually is or at least how well recovering alcoholics are able to demonstrate their IQ on tests. In addition, this study was relatively small and done on all-male veterans, so it may not apply directly to other populations (particularly to women).

Find out more: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has a Web article with information about what functions people lose with alcohol abuse and how long it takes to regain functioning.

Read the article: Zinn, S., Stein, R., and S. Swartzwelder. "Executive Functioning Early in Abstinence From Alcohol. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research." September 2004, Vol. 28, No. 9, pp. 1338–1346.

Abstract online: www.alcoholism-cer.com