Correlates of Alcoholic Blackout Experience

Correlates of Alcoholic Blackout Experience

4

after long drinking careers. It is possible that those already intellectually
compromised may be more susceptible to blackouts. Or, it is possible that
both reflect a greater cerebral sensitivity to the effects of alcohol. In either
case there should be an association between blackouts and intellectual
impairment. To the author’s knowledge, only one study has examined this
proposition. Tarter and Schneider [8] compared alcoholics with high (N = 23)
and low (N = 27) incidence of blackouts on four measures of learning and
memory including the well known Wechsler Memory Scale [13] and found no
difference between the groups. However, since this is the only study of its
kind, it may be timely to revisit the question.

Method

Subjects

The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of St.
Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin and was in compliance with the Helsinki
Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983.

The sample consisted of 67 alcohol abusing inpatients of an Irish
private psychiatric hospital who had been referred for examination of
suspected cognitive impairment secondary to alcohol abuse. All had received
a firm diagnosis of the alcohol dependence syndrome (ADS) according to
ICD-9 criteria [14]. The concept of alcohol dependence syndrome is very

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