Long-term cognitive sequelae of solvent intoxication

Memory problems lasting 8 months have previously been described for a small group of female solvent workers following an accidental workplace solvent intoxication. Three years after the intoxication the presence of longer-term residual impairment of cognitive functions was evaluated. The major residual difficulty uncovered related to the speed of processing linguistic material, with workers showing slower verification on tasks probing syntactic and semantic reasoning within the context of relatively unimpaired response execution speeds. Of particular interest was the intoxicated workers' difficulty with the conceptually more complex negative syntactic reasoning problems. This difficulty was also shared by solvent workers who were not involved in that accidental intoxication. In addition, decision fatigue was observed following prolonged responding in a continuous choice reaction time task, although ability to maintain vigilance and concentration were unaffected. Taken together, these findings indicate that a single solvent intoxication can give rise to long-term cognitive sequelae in solvent workers.