Monitoring the Effects of Chronic Alcohol Consumption and Abstinence on Brain Metabolism: A Longitudinal Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study

Background This study focused on metabolic brain alterations in recently detoxified alcohol-dependent patients (S1) and their possible reversibility after 3 (S2) and 6 months (S3) of abstinence. Methods Thirty-three alcohol-dependent patients and 30 healthy control subjects were studied with multislice proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (echo time = 135 msec at 1.5 T at three time points). Results In the patient group, we found that choline-containing compounds (Ch) in three frontal and cerebellar subregions at S1 were significantly below normal, whereas N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) differences did not reach significance but showed a trend toward below-normal values in frontal white matter. Abstinent patients showed a significant increase of Ch in all subregions at S2. At S3, no further significant metabolite changes in abstinent patients compared with S2 could be detected. No significant increase of NAA could be detected at follow-up. Conclusions The increase of the Ch signal in the follow-up measurement after 3 months in abstinent alcohol-dependent patients supports the hypotheses of an alcohol- or alcohol detoxification–induced altered cerebral metabolism of lipids in membranes or myelin, which seems to be reversible with duration of alcohol abstinence.