Neuropsychological functioning in sons of active alcoholic, recovering alcoholic, and social drinking fathers

Sons of active alcoholic, recovering alcoholic, and social drinking fathers were administered neuropsychological tests to assess whether they differ in their cognitive functioning. Multivariate analyses of variance showed that sons of active alcoholic sons perform significantly worse on visuospatial, memory, and attentional tasks as well as general intellectual functioning than sons of social drinking fathers. The sons of recovering alcoholic fathers showed no significant difference from social drinking fathers in their cognitive functioning. These results suggest that the clinical type of the alcoholic father (i.e., inability to abstain, more severe alcoholic vs. ability to abstain, less severe alcoholic) may be an important factor that determines whether offspring of alcoholics have neuropsychological deficits.