[Disorders of cognitive decision-making mechanisms related to reward in alcohol use disorders]

To assess the relationship of disorders of cognitive decision-making mechanisms related to reward with clinical indicators of alcohol dependence.

Forty-five patients with alcohol dependence were studied. A control group consisted of 30 age- and sex-matched healthy individuals. To quantify cognitive functions, the Go/NoGo task, the Balloon test (BART), the Cambridge Game Task (CGT) and the Iowa Game task (IGT) were used. The age of the first alcohol sample, the age of the beginning of systematic alcohol abuse, the average amount of alcohol consumption over the past month, the number of hospitalizations, the age of the first visit to a narcologist and the duration of the last remission were used as clinical indicators.

The indicators of executive functions are significantly reduced in patients with alcohol dependence compared with the control group. In the Go/NoGo task, patients have more errors, both on the Go signal (p=0.012) and on the NoGo signal (p=0.009). Significant differences in the group of patients with alcohol dependence from the control group were also revealed in CGT: patients had lower values of decision quality (QDM) (p=0.002), higher values of risk acceptance (OBR) (p=0.015), and they also needed more time to make decisions (DT) (p=0.012). It was also found that the age of the onset of systematic alcohol abuse directly correlates with the quality of decision-making in CGT (r_s=0.407, p=0.048).

The results emphasize the importance of studying cognitive impairment in patients with alcohol dependence, since the severity of these disorders is associated with the clinical course of the disease.