Implizite Einstellungen zu Alkohol bei Patienten nach stationärer Entgiftung

The aim of the current study was to extend previous results with bi-polar alcohol-IATs found in healthy study populations by exploring the associations of IAT-effects and drinking habits in a population of hospitalized alcohol-dependent inpatients. Correlations between im-plicit alcohol-associations, laboratory parameters, anamnestic data, explicit measures of alcohol-attitudes, alcohol-related questionnaires and neuropsychological measures were observed. The selected blood markers CDT, γGT and MCV revealed mixed results concerning their association with the found effects in the IAT. The biomarkers γGT und MCV do therefore not seem to be suitable variables for the estimation of implicit alcohol cognitions. A correlation between CDT and the IAT-effect was found for the patient’s group. The IAT also showed an addi-tional variance in the prediction of CDT-levels, after controlling for explicit alcohol-cognitions. A positive correlation between increased scores in the clinical alcohol-questionnaire MALT and positive implicit alcohol-cognitions was found. The negativequadratic relationship be-tween drinking levels and IAT-effect that wasfound in the healthy study population could not be replicated in the patient sample. The lack of significant correlations between the other explicit measures and the IAT points to the difference in the underlying concepts. The findings of the present study support theories of dual cognitive processing of drug-related stimuli as well as the theory of Incentive Sensitization in substance abuse and shows fundamental differences in alcohol cognitions of patients compared to non-addicted drinkers. Results once again confirmed that alcohol dependency is mediated by a complex etiological network in which single factors influence impli-cit attitudes towards the substance in a summative way.