We found evidence of PAC taking place in both AUD and unaffected groups under these conditions, albeit to varying degrees. Distributions of PAC estimates from all significant clusters ranged from roughly 0.6 to 0.85 in both men (Fig. 2B) and women (Fig. 3B) on a [0,1] scale which suggests that relatively small deviations in PAC might be diagnostically meaningful. A crossover study of alcohol intoxication in a sex-balanced group of healthy adults found small but significant reductions in delta-gamma and theta-gamma PAC to frontal and parietal EEG channels during resting state when under the influence of alcohol (Lee and Yun, 2014). The authors point out that the reduction in PAC strength is consistent with findings from other studies of alcohol intoxication-related decreased in functional connectivity, suggesting that the decreased PAC might reflect a disruption of information transfer between local neuronal assemblies and larger-scale brain networks. The reductions in delta-gamma and theta-gamma PAC during alcohol intoxication that they report contrast sharply with the greater PAC we saw, particularly among men with AUD. Though direct comparisons are not possible from the results
