Attentional Deficit, Alcoholism, and P300 Amplitude
Two of the largest issues concerning youth in the United States today are psychiatric illness and drug abuse. Increasingly large numbers of young people are being diagnosed with various neurological problems, such as depression, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems. In fact, the incidence of children diagnosed with ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, has risen from 4.4 million in 1997 to six million today. Drug use and abuse amongst young adults is also on the rise, with alcohol second only to cigarettes as the drug most commonly abused by teenagers. This paper will explore the neurological properties behind attention and alcohol abuse in relation to deficiencies in cognitive functioning; specifically that of working memory and attentional processing. Such deficiencies are validated by decreased amplitude at positive 300 ms (P3). in the measurement of event-related potential for certain cognitive tasks. These shared properties, along with other psychological evidence, show a possible correlation between ADHD and alcohol abuse, and consequently reveal many implications involving diagnoses and treatment of such disorders.
If this is the case, there are many implications in diagnosing and treating learning disabilities and alcohol and drug abuse disorders. The authors of this article also discovered that while the recruitment source of the subjects at-risk for alcoholism was basically irrelevant to P3 measurement, other moderators were fairly significant. Lastly, the difficulty of the task, and the modality of stimulus used for the task, were also moderators for the analysis. If a drug was developed that could affect the amplitude of the waveforms, than people with ADHD could possibly experience and increase in selective attentional processing that could be incredibly beneficial to their lives. The results of this procedure indicated that overall for the 30 studies reviewed, the at-risk subjects had significantly lower P3 amplitudes than control subjects who had no family history of alcoholism. For example, a subject whose father has required treatment for alcoholism is likely to show more of a discrepancy in P3 amplitude than a subjects whose positive family history of alcoholism is based on less extreme conditions. By factoring in these four moderators, the differences in P3 amplitude between at-risk and control subjects found in each of the 30 studies were standardized and consolidated using the very complicated mathematical rules of meta-analysis. Thus if there is any psychopathological disparity between subjects, it is likely to be amplified by a more difficult task. The difficulty of the task used to elicit the P3 has been shown to affect the degree of difference in amplitude between those at-risk for alcoholism and control subjects; the easier the task, the more difficult the task, the more cognitive resources are necessary to sustain attention. Articles from the computer searches (searches used such phrases as "P300," "late positive component," and "alcoholism risk) were selected for analysis if they pertained to the study of non-alcoholic males with and without a family history of alcoholism. Trouble with selective attention is one of the principle symptoms of ADHD, which is characterized by high distractibility and constant hyperactive behavior. Nonetheless, one might infer from the meta-analysis as a whole that there is a positive correlation between alcoholism and deficiencies in attentional processing. First of all, I believe that it is essential to somehow replicate the meta-analysis conducted of male subjects instead with female subjects. Therefore, source of recruitment was found to be a important moderator when pooling the results of the 30 experiments. I also would like to see more research in the area of drug therapy for ADHD that actually raises wave amplitude at P300.
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