The three proposed projects focus upon different aspects of the memory and cognitive disorders associated with long-term alcohol dependence. The first study deals with the role of familial factors in the degree of impairment and recovery with abstinence. Familial and non-familial alcoholics who have been abstinent for 1-2 months, 1-3 years, and 5-10 years will be compared on an extensive battery of memory and visuoperceptual tasks known to be impaired after long-term alcohol dependence. It is hypothesized that the alcoholics with positive family histories for alcoholism may also be more vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol and consequently may be more impaired and demonstrate less recovery than the alcoholics with a negative family history. The second set of proposed studies deals with the qualitative similarities in the memory disorders of alcoholic Korsakoff patients and long-term alcoholics. If there is a continuum of cognitive impairment encompassing both groups of patients then the non-Korsakoff alcoholics' verbal and nonverbal memory disorders should reflect some of the same encoding and retrieval problems that have been associated with Korsakoff's syndrome. Three experiments, two dealing with verbal and one with nonverbal materials, are designed to assess whether these qualitative similarities exist. The third set of experiments is focused upon the nature of the alcoholic Korsakoff patients' memory disorder. Experiments dealing with the interaction between the patients' encoding and retrieval deficits, the intactness of their semantic memory and rule learning, their rate of forgetting learned information and the role of storage and retrieval deficits in the patients' recall of remote public events and autobiographical memories are proposed. The performance of the Korsakoff patients on these tasks will be compared with that of a group of demented patients (Huntington's Disease) in order to isolate those memory and cognition problems that are unique to long-term alcoholism.
| 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 |
