Alcohol and Learning

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Abstract
To the Editor: In a recent editorial, Dr. Mendelson1 discussed the difficulties of assessing in an alcoholic patient population the relative importance of malnutrition, ethanol per se and the effect of multiple withdrawal reactions upon brain function.That malnutrition rather than ethanol per se could explain impaired learning ability in the experiments described in Science2 is highly improbable for several reasons, the first being that, to increase the percentage of ethanol withdrawal convulsions in mice, weight reduction preceded the initiation of ethanol diets in previous acute experiments.3 However, weight reduction was not used in the chronic experiments,2 and the high-ethanol-preference . . .