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. 2012 Oct;22(10):704-10.
doi: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2012.02.003. Epub 2012 Mar 6.

Alcohol consumption and premotor corpus callosum in older adults

Dimitrios Kapogiannis  1 , Jason Kisser, Christos Davatzikos, Luigi Ferrucci, Jeffrey Metter, Susan M Resnick
Affiliations

Alcohol consumption and premotor corpus callosum in older adults

Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2012 Oct.

Abstract

Heavy alcohol consumption is toxic to the brain, especially to the frontal white matter (WM), but whether lesser amounts of alcohol negatively impact the brain WM is unclear. In this study, we examined the relationship between self-reported alcohol consumption and regional WM and grey matter (GM) volume in fifty-six men and thirty-seven women (70+- 7years) cognitively intact participants of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) with no history of alcohol abuse. We used regional analysis of volumes examined in normalized space (RAVENS) maps methodology for WM and GM segmentation and normalization followed by voxel based morphometry (VBM) implemented in SPM8 to examine the cross-sectional association between alcohol consumption and regional WM (and, separately, GM) volume controlling for age, sex, smoking, blood pressure and dietary thiamine intake. WM VBM revealed that in men, but not in women, higher alcohol consumption was associated with lower volume in premotor frontal corpus callosum. This finding suggests that even moderate amounts of alcohol may be detrimental to corpus callosum and white matter integrity.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure
Figure
The frontal CC cluster (peak voxel MNI co-ordinates: 2, 10, 24) negatively associated with alcohol consumption in men. a. Axial interpolation of the cluster on the average image from the WM RAVENS maps of fifty-six men. b. 3D-rendering of the cluster on the average image from the WM RAVENS maps of fifty-six men (left sagital view). c. 3D-rendering of the cluster on the average image from the WM RAVENS maps of fifty-six men (anterior coronal view). d. Frontal CC cluster volume and alcohol consumption. The y-axis depicts WM RAVENS map intensities for the corpus callosum cluster, which represent the WM volume contained in the cluster (for a detailed explanation of the RAVENS maps methodology, see Methods); the x-axis depicts alcohol consumption in units/week. ROI = region of interest; CC = corpus callosum; green dots/regression line = men; blue dots/regression line = women.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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