Similar to structural MRI findings demonstrating pronounced tissue- volume shrinkage of orbitofrontal cortices in abstinent alcoholics who were likely to resume drinking (e.g., Beck et al. 2012; Cardenas et al. 2011; Durazzo et al. 2011), DTI identified alcoholic individuals more likely to resume drinking 6 months following initial evaluation based on lower FA and higher diffusivity in frontal white matter at baseline (Sorg et al. 2012). Increases in FA and decreases in diffusivity have been interpreted as evidence for white-matter recovery with abstinence. Studies have shown recovery in corpus callosum at 1 year compared with 2 weeks of abstinence (Alhassoon et al. 2012) and in frontal white matter at 1 month compared with 1 week of abstinence, at least in nonsmoking, sober alcoholics (Gazdzinski et al. 2010). Other reports suggest that some white-matter impairments persist after 6 to 30 months of recovery in alcoholics relative to healthy controls (Zorlu et al. 2014). In a seminal longitudinal study of 47 alcoholic and 56 healthy controls study participants, Pfefferbaum and colleagues (2014) reported that, despite abnormally low FA, age trajectories of the alcoholics who abstained were positive and progressing toward normality, whereas those of the relapsing alcoholics and control subjects were negative.
