A neuropsychologic profile of adolescent alcoholics

Male and female adolescents who qualified for a DSM-III-R diagnosis of Alcohol Abuse or Dependence and a control sample of nonalcohol-abusing male and female adolescents were administered a battery of intellectual, achievement, and neuropsychologic tests. Alcohol-abusing adolescents were found to have significantly lower verbal and full-scale IQ scores than controls. Furthermore, alcohol-abusing adolescents were found to have a trend toward lower age-standardized scores on achievement tests of reading ability and spelling. Surprisingly, alcohol-abusing adolescents made less perseverative errors and commission errors on a learning and memory task than controls. Control males performed worse on the Wisconsin Card Sort than alcoholic males, whereas alcohol-abusing females performed worse than control females. In addition, alcoholic subjects scored better than controls on a measure of visual memory sensitivity. The results indicate that adolescent alcohol abusers in general have poorer language skills than adolescents who do not abuse alcohol. However, in contrast to results obtained from studies of adult alcoholics, there is little evidence of significant brain damage as revealed by using neuropsychologic test performance.