CHANGES IN THE BRAIN IN ALCOHOLISM

Abstract

The problem of the misuse of alcohol and its effects on the human organism is an old one. The interest of neurologists in the subject was suddenly focused by the publication of Wernicke's 1 paper in 1881. He described the cases of 3 patients who died and were found, post mortem, to have punctate hemorrhages surrounded by fat granule corpuscles about the third and fourth ventricles and the midbrain. Clinically, the patients had shown paralysis of the ocular muscles, ataxic gait and disturbance of consciousness, ending in coma. There were also changes in the optic disks. He expressed the belief that the condition was a disease entity. It has been called, even to the present, Wernicke's disease, or polioencephalitis superior alcoholica. In his first case, however, the disease was not due to alcoholism. The patient, a woman aged 20, had been poisoned with sulfuric acid and later suffered from vomiting;