title: Clinical and physiological implications and correlations.
abstract: Cerebral dysfunction in alcoholics has important treatment implications. However, overall correlations between neuropathological impairment, neuropsychiatric performance, and clinical outcome are low and seldom reported to exceed 0.3-0.4. Three main diagnostic issues are discussed, reversibility of dementia symptoms, frontal lobe dysfunction, and the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. To predict the reversibility of dementia symptoms in the individual alcoholic is important for the clinician. While routine diagnostic procedures do not give such information, a combination of brain imaging techniques and psychometric tests could be a possible development. Frontal lobe dysfunction is related to high-level cognition and general integration of behaviour. Psychometric tests give uncertain results. Inclusion of brain imaging techniques could possibly improve the diagnostic procedure. The autopsy frequency of the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is much higher than the clinical diagnostic prevalence during life. This discrepancy may be related to the rarity of the classical symptoms and to overdiagnosis of non-Korsakoff alcohol dementia.
authors.affiliation: Department of Alcohol Diseases, University of Lund, Malmoe General Hospital, Sweden.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Berglund
mesh_terms: D000425:Alcohol Amnestic Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000437:Alcoholism / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans