All alcoholics and controls underwent a series of structured interviews to characterize alcohol history and other pertinent medical and psychiatric information. Clinical psychologists administered the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (First et al. 1994) to identify study volunteers who met criteria for alcohol dependence or abuse, to exclude subjects who met lifetime criteria for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or for non-alcohol substance dependence or abuse within the prior 3 months, and to confirm that prospective controls did not meet DSM-IV criteria for any Axis I disorder. History of alcohol consumption (Pfefferbaum et al. 1992; Skinner 1982; Skinner and Sheu 1982), yielding quantitative lifetime consumption of alcohol, revealed that the alcoholics drank about 13 times as much as the controls. The alcoholics were abstinent from alcohol for about 1 year on average (range 2 days to 2.5 years).
