Science / Medicine : Alcoholism Found to Impair Brain

Brain scans of relatively young adult alcoholics show a significant slowing of the brain’s metabolism and shrinkage of the cerebral cortex, both signs of impairment, researchers said last week. “We observed up to a 20% decrease in the rate of brain metabolism in alcoholics when compared to nonalcoholics” based on scans that measured how fast injections of glucose were metabolized, Gene-Jack Wang of the Brookhaven National Laboratory said at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

He studied 10 alcoholic men and 10 nonalcoholics between the ages of 27 and 51. All the men appeared healthy and showed no outward signs of neurological damage. A technique called positron emission tomography was used to examine 115 locations in their brains.

In other reports presented at the meeting:

* Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said a noninvasive angiography technique may be preferable to the use of catheters to detect blockage of arteries that lead to strokes.

* Magnetic resonance images of the wrists of patients with carpal tunnel syndrome, a debilitating and often painful condition that affects workers who make repetitive hand motions, found sufferers had abnormalities in a wrist ligament. Most wrist surgeries that relieve the condition successfully remove the ligament and expand the pathway for a key nerve, researchers at Freie University in Berlin said.