Neuropsychopharmacologia Hungarica : a Magyar Pszichofarmakológiai Egyesület lapja = official journal of the Hungarian Association of Psychopharmacology
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Neuropsychopharmacol Hung · Sep 2009
[Cognitive impairment in patients with alcoholism after long-term abstinence].
Patients with alcoholism display impaired cognitive information processing. In this study, we use clinically useful and effective neurocognitive tests to investigate these impairments. Twenty patients with the DSM-IV diagnosis of alcohol dependency and 20 age-, gender-, education-, and IQ-matched healthy control subjects participated in the study. ⋯ On the other hand, episodic memory and delayed memory functions were intact. These results show that in some cognitive domains (executive functions and semantic fluency), the performance is related to the duration of the abstinent period, which may suggest the recovery of these functions. Some other domains do not show such an improvement, which could be due to a primary deficit or to a slower recovery process.