ABSTRACT
Introduction ............................................................................................ 21 Evolutionary Cytoarchitectonics and the Archicortical and Paleocortical Trends ............................................................................... 23 Alcoholism and Premature Aging ......................................................... 23 Involvement of Cerebral Cortex and Frontal Brain Systems ............... 26 Involvement of the Right Hemisphere .................................................. 29 Musical, Facial, and Emotional Cognition ............................................ 30 Summary and Conclusions .................................................................... 33 Acknowledgment ................................................................................... 35 References ............................................................................................... 35
Many researchers have noted a similarity in the brain changes observed with normal chronological aging and brain changes occurring after many years of alcoholism (reviewed by Oscar-Berman and colleagues
). For example, Wilkinson and Carlen
described a study in which brain scans of alcoholic individuals were compared to those of patients who had a variety of neurological conditions unrelated to alcoholism. The ages of all of the patients ranged from the 20s through the 60s. The researchers found that the brains of the alcoholic patients, as well as chronologically older nonalcoholic patients, appeared to be shrunken inside their skulls. Decades earlier, Courville
described this same feature of cerebral atrophy in the autopsied brain specimens of alcoholic individuals, and he likened it to the brain volume decrease that occurs with normal chronological aging. That is, alcoholic and normal
aging individuals showed widespread cortical shrinkage, most prominently in the frontal part of the brain. Considered together, these findings provided early evidence that gave rise to the
premature aging hypothesis
, i.e., the idea that alcoholism somehow accelerates normal chronological aging.
