childhood conduct disorder symptoms but not with the presence/absence of a family history of alcoholism; and (3) discriminant function analysis revealed that P3 amplitude alone accurately identified 70.6 percent of the patients who later relapsed and 53.3 percent of the patients who did not. Hegerl and colleagues (1995) recorded N1 and P2 components to auditory stimuli in five different intensities in hospitalized alcoholic patients after 1 week of withdrawal and found that patients with antisocial tendencies showed a significantly stronger intensity dependence of their evoked responses of primary auditory cortices (tangential dipoles). This suggests that alcoholics with strong intensity dependence in their ERPs, along with antisocial tendencies, formed a subgroup with a serotonergic hypofunction and may respond favorably to relapse prevention with serotonergic drugs. Furthermore, Winterer and colleagues (2003) found that increases in bilateral, intrahemispheric posterior coherences in the alpha and beta frequency in alcohol-dependent study participants covaried with depressiveness. Taken together, these findings suggest that electrophysiological measures of brain function can aid in diagnostic classification and subtyping, which may lead to better prevention and treatment strategies.
