Fortunately these disorders are for the most part reversible after abstinence, specialists in Paris said Thursday.
“The attacks are very variable“, explains Hélène Beaunieux, a researcher in neuropsychology during a meeting-debate organized by Inserm with associations providing assistance to people in difficulty with alcohol.
France has 1.5 million alcohol dependents and 3.5 million people suffering from excessive consumption.
According to Ms. Beaunieux, who has been working on the impact of alcoholism on memory for several years at the University of Caen, hospital care is not suitable for cognitive disorders.
“Patients are currently being asked to forget their habits and set up other automatisms in the space of 15 days, which is just impossible from a cognitive point of view.f “, she emphasizes.
Alcohol can indeed have effects on short-term memory, which makes it possible to store and manipulate information for a few minutes, but also on episodic memory which makes it possible to recall events experienced in a specific context.
It also acts on “the metamemory” which makes it possible to know and control the functioning of its memory and to self-evaluate, a function often disturbed in alcoholics who tend to “overestimate”, according to the researcher.
When episodic memory is deficient, for example, patients arrive at the hospital when they “have not yet become aware of their problem”, explains the researcher.
Less effective learning
Based on the work she has done in Caen, she underlines that their learning capacity is also “more expensive and less effective” than that of non-alcoholics, whether it is a question of acquiring new knowledge. or new procedures.
But the good news is, this memory loss is usually reversible in abstinent patients, with the exception of those with Korsakoff syndrome, the most severe form of alcohol dependence.
“A significant improvement” in cognitive abilities was thus observed in 14 patients reviewed six months after the start of their abstinence, while a deterioration in executive functions (allowing flexible behavior and adapted to the context) was observed in the 20 patients who had relapsed.
According to Bertrand Nalpas, researcher in alcoholology at Inserm, the difficulty lies in identifying “those who risk getting worse and falling into an irreversible state”.
There are avenues, such as the nutritional trail, with lesions that would be more severe in the event of vitamin deficiency. But genetic sensitivity is also advanced, as is the environment and history that can influence gene expression.