EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTS OF THE NEUROLOGICAL AND NUTRITIONAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE AND MOTOR DISTURBANCES DUE TO CHRONIC ALCOHOL USE

Background and Aim : alcohol usage doesn’t cause exactly same cognitive and motor disturbances in individuals. This variation must be related to personal differences in brain function and body nutritional composition. This study was aimed to clear the effects of the neurological and nutritional differences in cognitive and motor disturbances due to chronic alcohol use.Methods : forty dossiers of patients with ages 40 to 60 which were admitted to emergency department of Vali-e-Asr hospital due to alcohol toxicity were reviewed by the researcher. And 40 normal person with no history of alcohol usage were recruited as control group. All alcoholic patients had history of chronic use of alcohol for at least 10 years and were diagnosed as Wernicke encephalopathy according to their brain MRI images. Caine criteria for assessing the Wernicke function were questioned from all patients. Four motor and cognitive functions were evaluated in all patients by the researcher.Results : according to the Caine criteria 32 of 40 alcoholic patients had various levels of dysfunction in cerebellum, general cognitive functioning, dietary regulation and eye ball movement. Lack of balance in walking was due to cerebellar disturbances, weakness and other movement dysfunction of the body specially extremities was due to low blood thiamine level. None of healthy individuals had Wernicke encephalopathy but low blood thiamine was detected in 6 of 40 healthy participants who none of them had no sign or symptoms of motor dysfunction. Cerebellar and ocular movements were all normal in control group.Conclusion : the results showed that the biological differences could be one of the most effective factors in what manifestation would be seen in alcoholic persons. Especially Wernicke encephalopathy, thiamine deficiency and cerebellar dysfunction are main reasons for this variations. All these disturbances exert their effects on different sites of the brain such as frontal and temporal lobes of the brain and limbic circuitry. Beside the different dysfunctions due to alcohol usage, different sites of the brain could be compromised by alcohol and be the responsible for variant alcohol addiction manifestations.

Keywords:

Cognition , Neurobiology , Alcoholics