Abstract
<i>Background</i>: long term drinking in alcohol dependent patients seriously affects their physical and mental health. Abstinence treatment is very important, but there is no appropriate prediction method for the effect of abstinence in the past. <i>Objective</i>: In this study, we investigated word-cue attentional bias among male patients with alcohol dependence and its correlation with relapse after abstinence. <i>Methods</i>: Fifty male patients with alcohol dependence (ADs) and 50 male health controls (HCs) completed the Chinese version of the emotional Stroop task to assess attentional bias. The participants were evaluated at the beginning of the task using the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS). <i>Results</i>: The reaction times of ADs for neutral, negative, and alcohol-related words were significantly higher than those of HCs. The error index of ADs for neutral and negative words is worse than that of HCs. The period of maintained abstinence among ADs was positively correlated with the reaction time to negative words and the error index for negative and alcohol-related words. Linear regression showed the error index of alcohol-related words to be an import factor in terms of relapse. <i>Conclusion</i>: The number of errors in alcohol-related attentional bias cue words may be a predictor of the effect of abstinence.
Highlights
Alcohol abuse leads to a series of serious health and social problems
The inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) patients satisfied the diagnostic criteria for AD specified in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision (ICD-10); (2) treatment time of hospitalization was within 5-15 days without withdrawal symptoms following the experiment (AD hospitalized for abstinence); and (3) the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score was larger than 26 points
All procedures were conducted in accordance with the guidelines put forth in the Declaration of Helsinki, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants
Summary
Alcohol abuse leads to a series of serious health and social problems. Research has indicated that an estimated 4.9% of the world's adult population (240 million people) suffers from alcohol use disorder (7.8% of men and 1.5% of women), with alcohol causing an estimated 257 disability-adjusted life years lost per 100,000 population [1]. Studies have revealed long-standing heavy alcohol abuse leads to disproportionate loss of cerebral white matter and impairments in executive function [2]. These lesions lead to the cognitive decline. Janssen et al [3] they found that certain measures of alcohol-related attentional bias predicted later alcohol use in young adolescents. Excessive drinking sensitizes alcohol abusers' attentional responsiveness to alcohol-related stimuli [4, 5]. Even though AD has been the focus of multiple studies, there are many aspects of the condition, such as the relationship between attention bias and abstinence of AD, that remain unclear.
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