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Disruption of Frontal Lobe Neural Synchrony During Cognitive Control by Alcohol Intoxication
Published on: February 6, 2019
Alcohol and cognitive function: assessment in everyday life and laboratory settings using mobile phones
Brian Tiplady1, Bami Oshinowo, Joanne Thomson
1Department of Anaesthesia, Pain, and Critical Care Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. brian@penscreen.com
Background:
Mobile phone (cellphone) technology makes it practicable to assess cognitive function in a natural setting. We assessed this method and compared impairment of performance due to alcohol in everyday life with measurements made in the laboratory.
Methods:
Thirty-eight volunteers (20 male, aged 18-54 years) took part in the everyday study, completing assessments twice a day for 14 days following requests sent by text messages to the mobile phone. Twenty-six of them (12 male, aged 19-54) took part in a subsequent two-period crossover lab study comparing alcohol with no alcohol (placebo).
Results:
Everyday entries with 5 or more units of alcohol consumed in the past 6 hours (inferred mean blood alcohol concentration 95 ml/100 ml) showed higher scores for errors in tests of attention and working memory compared with entries with no alcohol consumed that day. Response times were impaired for only 1 test, sustained attention to response. The laboratory comparison of alcohol (mean blood alcohol concentration 124 mg/100 ml) with placebo showed impairment to both reaction time and error scores for all tests. A similar degree of subjective drunkenness was reported in both settings.
Conclusions:
We found that mobile phones allowed practical research on cognitive performance in an everyday life setting. Alcohol impaired function in both laboratory and everyday life settings at relevant doses of alcohol.
