This project renewal proposal requests continued support for collaborative studies on two aspects of alcoholic Korsakoff and chronic alcoholics' cognitive impairments. The first component seeks to utilize new quantitative techniques for the analysis of MR images of alcoholic Korsakoff patients and non-Korsakoff chronic alcoholics. Our prior research has shown that volume losses in the anterior portions of the diencephalon, mesial temporal lobe and orbitofrontal cortices best differentiate Korsakoff from non-Korsakoff chronic alcoholics. However, the chronic alcoholic patients do, in turn, demonstrate some loss in these areas relative to normal controls. Using an improved analytic technique will enable us to investigate more specifically the roles of the basal forebrain and mesial temporal lobe structures in these patients' memory and cognitive disorders. In addition, investigations of volumetric changes in specific neural structure and, in particular, the frontal lobe to these cognitive disabilities will be made. The second component extends our search for the cognitive factors underlying alcoholic Korsakoff and non-Korsakoff chronic alcoholics' memory disorders. Our prior research has shown that chronic alcoholics' information processing disturbances do not necessarily parallel those seen in Korsakoff patients, nor do they mimic any other brain injured population (e.g., right hemisphere patients), nor do they necessarily indicate accelerated aging. Instead, they appear to emanate from inabilities to utilize the processing system in creative or effortful ways. To more specifically explore this thesis, we propose to investigate five contemporary aspects of information processing which emphasize subject-driven (conceptual) processing as opposed to data-driven (automatic) processing. We anticipate that an element of subject-driven, effortful processing will be deficient in chronic alcoholics and in Korsakoff patients. Furthermore, we anticipate that this pattern may be correlated with volumetric loss in specific neural structures.
| Pletcher, Mathew T; McClurg, Philip; Batalov, Serge et al. (2004) Use of a dense single nucleotide polymorphism map for in silico mapping in the mouse. PLoS Biol 2:e393 |
