Correlates of Alcoholic Blackout Experience

Correlates of Alcoholic Blackout Experience
3
A comparison between alcohol abusers who have and have not experienced
blackouts

Introduction

Blackouts, periods of time when intoxicated for which the person has
little or no memory [1], are common among drinkers of all sorts, from those
with relatively modest consumption to the severely alcoholic [2, 3, 4]. They
are characterised by Lishman [1] as involving “ a dense amnesia for
significant events which have occurred during a drinking episode, when at the
time outward behaviour perhaps seemed little disordered” (p. 595). While
they can occur early on in drinking careers [5, 6, 7], there are some indications
that they become more frequent with severity of alcohol problems and
duration of alcohol consumption [2, 4, 8, 9,10].

The mechanism underlying blackouts is unknown. There is some
evidence that they may be related to the rapidity of the rise in blood alcohol
level [11].

As mentioned above, blackouts may be more common among late stage
drinkers and cognitive impairment (and presumably underlying cerebral
derangement of some sort) is also more common among the same group [see
e.g., 12]. However, not all heavy drinkers or the alcoholically dependent
suffer from blackouts and not all suffer from intellectual impairment even

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