By the 1960’s enough circumstantial evidence had accumulated to lead some researchers to propose that chronic alcoholism is associated with premature aging of the brain (for reviews, see Freund and Butters 1982 and Wood and Elias 1982). This claim, referred to as the “premature aging hypothesis,” originally evolved from observations concerning structural brain changes. For example, Wilkinson and Carlen (1982) described a study in which the brain scans of alcoholics were compared with those of a group of patients who had a variety of neurological conditions unrelated to alcoholism. The participants’ ages spanned five age groups, from the twenties through the sixties. The researchers found that the brains of alcoholics, as well as those of older nonalcoholics, appeared to be shrunken inside their skulls. Decades earlier, Courville (1966) described this same feature of alcoholics’ brains, and he likened it to the brain shrinkage associated with normal chronological aging. More recently, Pfefferbaum and colleagues (1992) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques and found evidence of increased brain tissue loss in alcoholics, compared with nonalcoholics, even after their ages had been taken
