Abstract
Alcohol consumption among young adults is widely accepted in modern society and may be the starting point for abusive use of alcohol at later stages of life. Chronic alcohol exposure can lead to visual function impairment. In the present study, we investigated the spatial luminance contrast sensitivity, colour arrangement ability, and colour discrimination thresholds on young adults that weekly consume alcoholic beverages without clinical concerns. Twenty-four young adults were evaluated by an ophthalmologist and performed three psychophysical tests to evaluate their vision functions. We estimated the spatial luminance contrast sensitivity function at 11 spatial frequencies ranging from 0.1 to 30 cycles/degree. No difference in contrast sensitivity was observed comparing alcohol consumers and control subjects. For the evaluation of colour vision, we used the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test (FM 100 test) to test subject’s ability to perform a colour arrangement task and the Mollon-Reffin test (MR test) to measure subject’s colour discrimination thresholds. Alcohol consumers made more mistakes than controls in the FM100 test, and their mistakes were diffusely distributed in the FM colour space without any colour axis preference. Alcohol consumers also performed worse than controls in the MR test and had higher colour discrimination thresholds compared to controls around three different reference points of a perceptually homogeneous colour space, the CIE 1976 chromaticity diagram. There was no colour axis preference in the threshold elevation observed among alcoholic subjects. Young adult weekly alcohol consumers showed subclinical colour vision losses with preservation of spatial luminance contrast sensitivity. Adolescence and young adult age are periods of important neurological development and alcohol exposure during this period of life might be responsible for deficits in visual functions, especially colour vision that is very sensitive to neurotoxicants.
Highlights
In accordance to World Health Organization (WHO), alcohol is the oldest and widest used psychoactive substance consumed by humans around the world [1]
This study showed that young adults with limited, weekly habits of alcohol consumption already exhibit signs of visual function impairment when compared to control subjects of the same age
No studies investigated whether colour vision of adolescents and young adults was more vulnerable to ethanol toxicity than other visual functions such as luminance spatial contrast sensitivity
Summary
In accordance to World Health Organization (WHO), alcohol is the oldest and widest used psychoactive substance consumed by humans around the world [1]. Sancho-Tello and colleagues showed that chronic ethanol consumption induced oxidative stress in the rat retina, ERG alterations, and overexpression of the antiapoptotic Bcl-2 protein, and suggested that these pathological findings could be explained by an alcoholic retinopathy in this animal model [22]. Lantz and colleagues tested whether early alcohol exposure would lead to visual function impairment in mice by recording the electroretinogram (ERG), visual evoked cortical potential (VECP), and visual cortex optical imaging [23]. They found that mice exposed to ethanol, in comparison with controls, displayed similar spatial frequency acuity, lower contrast sensitivity, ERG with smaller a- and b-waves, and distorted visual cortex retinotopic maps [23]
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