Our findings do not support the findings of Jones et al. (2006) and Rangaswamy et al. (2007) that the ERO power measures provide more powerful group discriminators than the ERP amplitude measures. The requisite statistical analyses were not applied to their data to substantiate their conclusions. Our findings cannot be generalized to their data though, as differences in samples (i.e. differences in the population (LTAA vs. active alcoholics vs. individuals at high risk of alcoholism), age and gender of the subjects) and in the experimental paradigm precludes such generalization. From our subject sample, it is not possible to distinguish the effects of predisposition to alcoholism, chronic alcohol abuse and recovery from alcoholism. Further investigation of EROs in populations of active alcoholics and offspring of alcoholics are necessary to address these issues. However, our results do show the importance of appropriate statistical analyses to draw conclusions regarding the relative predictive power of different biomarkers of alcoholism.
