Neuropsychological findings provided the earliest insights into restored function in abstinent alcoholics (Oscar-Berman and Marinkovic, 2007), and neuroimaging has permitted the quantification of neural tissue repair and recovery with abstinence (Buhler and Mann, 2011). Early neuroimaging evidence for structural brain damage and subsequent improvement among abstinent alcoholics was reported by Carlen et al. (1978), who demonstrated reduced atrophy in recently abstinent alcoholics; improvement was not seen in those who relapsed. Modern MRI studies have confirmed and extended those findings to include demonstrations of recovery in brain volume, microstructure, and neurochemistry (Pfefferbaum et al., 1995; Demirakca et al., 2011; Durazzo et al., 2011; Alhassoon et al., 2012). This body of knowledge has grown steadily to include manifestations of recovery in a wide spectrum of tissue properties across several imaging modalities (Oscar-Berman and Marinkovic, 2007; Schulte et al., 2012c). In particular, improvements in brain tissue volumes following periods of abstinence from alcohol have been observed in gray matter (Durazzo et al., 2011) and in white matter (Ruiz et al., 2013), often with corresponding decreases in the volume of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Potential
