A comparison of the effects of long-term alcohol abuse and aging on the performance of verbal and nonverbal divided attention tasks.

The purpose of this study was to assess two versions of the hypothesis that alcohol abuse results in premature aging of the brain and of cognitive functioning. The performances of detoxified long-term alcoholic was compared with that of nonalcoholic controls on three divided attention tasks known to be sensitive to aging. While both forms of the premature aging hypothesis predicted that alcoholics should perform more poorly than controls, the hypotheses differed in their predictions of the interactions between the effects of alcohol and normal aging. The results showed that while all three tasks were sensitive to age, only two were affected by long-term alcohol abuse. On one of the tests affected by both age and alcohol abuse, the performance of both young and old alcoholics was equally impaired whereas on the other, only the older alcoholics had significant difficulties. Based on these findings it was concluded that there was only partial overlap between the effects of alcohol and aging, and that neither of the two forms of the premature aging hypothesis could predict the observed pattern of results.