Preliminary study on the correlation between cognitive function and serotonin transporter image in patients of pure alcoholism and depressive alcoholism

• Main Authors: Jen-Cheng Lin, 林仁政
• Other Authors: Wai-Cheong Tam
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67302604337284663762

碩士 === 中原大學 === 心理學研究所 === 95 === It is found in clinical research that patients with alcoholism often had many psychiatric symptoms too. Therefore it seems that the present diagnostic system for alcoholism is not adequate. Results of epidemiological studies have proved that there is strong relation between alcoholism and major depression, but the exact mechanism is still not well known. Lesch et al. indicated that if the gene of the serotonin transporter is vulnerable, it will lead to symptoms such as alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. However, there are still differences between alcoholism with and without depression. It is worth to study the relationship between the physiological pathway and symptoms of these disorders. The main purposes of this study are: 1. Investigate the differences of the amounts of serotonin transporter among patients with pure alcoholism, depressive alcoholism, and major depression respectively. 2. Investigate the differences of neurocognitive functioning among patients with pure alcoholism, depressive alcoholism, major depression respectively, and the controlled group. 3. Study the relationship between the amounts of serotonin transporter and neurocognitive functioning among the above four groups. There were four groups of participants. The pure alcoholism group, major depression group, depressive alcoholism group, and normal control group have 5, 15, 9, and 6 participants respectively. Informed consent was obtained from each participant, who received the administration of WCST, Stroop, HKLLT and 123I-ADAM SPECT scanning. The nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance and Pearson’s product correlation were used for statistical analysis. Results indicated that the control group and the major depression group had significant differences in the amounts of serotonin transporter in five brain regions. There was significant difference on random learning ability between the depression and control groups. The number of trials to complete the first category of the WCST had significant correlation with the amounts of serotonin transporter for the pure alcoholism group. In this study, the amounts of serotonin transporter in the frontal region of all the three patient groups were higher than that of the control group, which was the first time discovered in the field of serotonin transporter image research. This phenomenon had been discovered in pathological dissection. These results support that alcoholism and depression might have some relations with the amounts of serotonin transporter. However, both the hypotheses on the correlation between neuropsychological test scores and the amounts of serotonin transporter, and the proposed alcoholism classification method were not supported.