Ingestão aguda e crônica de etanol no funcionamento auditivo e neurocognitivo

Abstract

It is known that ethanol present in the alcoholic beverages, of acute or chronic ingestion in its various levels, leave to a variety of organic alterations that can interfere with more basic behavioral and cognitive processes. In this sense, the present study aimed to evaluate the influence of acute and chronic ethanol intake in the auditory perception and neuropsychological functioning. Acute ingestion was experimentally manipulated in college students with 18 to 30 years old compared with themselves in two different sessions. In one of days, they had to ingest a quantity of alcohol proportional to their body weight and when they possessed 0.08% of ethanol in the blood they were evaluated. In another day, they drank just a placebo drink. The chronic ingestion of alcohol was evaluated in Alcoholics Anonymous participants, aged 40-60 years, who had 1-15 years of abstinence. They were evaluated in separate groups of three years of abstinence and were compared to a control group of first degree relatives. The auditory perception was evaluated by means of a test for discrimination of musical notes corresponding to standard Western scale sound frequencies. Cognitive functioning was evaluated by means of neuropsychological tests for the processes of memory, attention, and executive functioning. The results showed that both forms of alcohol intake cause perceptual hearing loss as well as the some neuropsychological subfunctions evaluated, suggesting that the use of ethanol may be a path of some cognitive impairment.