excessive alcohol consumption adversely affects the pons (Adams et al., 1959) and thalamus (Kril and Butterworth, 1997; Harding et al., 2000). The pons sustains reduction of numbers of serotonergic (Halliday et al., 1993) and noradrenergic neurons (Arango et al., 1994). Although not always forthcoming with in vivo MRI (Shear et al., 1994), neuropathologically, the thalamus has been seen to be abnormally small in alcoholics (Kril and Butterworth, 1997) in terms of the size of thalamic nuclei and the number and size of neurons in the thalamic nuclei (Belzunegui et al., 1995; Harding et al., 2000).
