Correlates of Alcoholic Blackout Experience
7
most of those referred for neuropsychological assessment. The measure of
liver function in the standard hospital package of laboratory tests was GGT.
The examiner was blind to the results of the GGT test, which were later taken
from the general hospital file. Blood samples for GGT testing were given
during the first few days of hospitalisation. It was thought that this test might
serve as an index of physical susceptibility to the deleterious effects of
alcohol.
Other relevant information was also gathered, either from interview or
the hospital file. These included aspects of drinking history: approximate
duration of alcohol abuse, presence of withdrawal symptoms, blackouts,
morning drinking, loss of control over drinking and the presence of physical
complications, such as gastroenteritis or frank liver disease, considered to be
associated with alcohol abuse. Blackouts, of particular interest in this paper,
were coded as present if the criteria of Lishman [1] (a dense amnesia for a
time when outward behaviour was not disorded) were met.
Data treatment
All cognitive test scores were age-scaled and transformed to yield a
mean of 10 and standard deviation of 3. The norms used for this were manual
norms [20, 21] for the WAIS and WAIS-R variables, distributions provided by
Abikoff et al. [22] for Logical Memory, by Russell [23] for Visual