As with other modalities, DTI studies support brain recovery with abstinence. For example, active alcohol users have abnormal diffusivity in frontal-temporal regions correlated with impulsivity and deficits in attention and memory; by contrast, abstinent alcoholics show attenuated DTI changes specific to parietal regions associated with visuospatial information processing and self-awareness problems (Monnig et al., 2013). Other reports show normalization of frontal white matter microstructure with just one month of abstinence in recovering alcoholics that do not smoke (Gazdzinski, Durazzo, Mon, Yeh, & Meyerhoff, 2010), and reversal of white matter damage in the corpus callosum with one year of abstinence (Alhassoon et al., 2012; Zorlu et al., 2014).
