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Biomedical subjects

J A Ewing

Publications and source records attributed to J A Ewing.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Recognizing, confronting and helping the alcoholic.

Vomiting, amnesia, a history of falls and other injuries, and depression and anxiety may all be clues to a drinking problem. Decreased work performance, absenteeism and difficulty in getting along with others may be present. Coming to grips with the problem is essential. Once the patient accepts the need for abstinence, the use of disulfiram (Antabuse) and the support of Alcoholics Anonymous are both therapeutically valuable.

Alcoholism

The temporal and volumetric components of stress induced drinking in rats.

Two experiments are presented which describe the temporal and volumetric changes in ethanol consumption with rats exposed to recurring schedules of inescapable random shock stress. The animals in Experiment I had an ethanol and water choice and the data demonstrated cumulative increases in voluntary ethanol consumption which occurred immediately after the shock schedule. The post shock changes occurred with both 5% and 10% V/V ethanol, were specific to the appearance of shock and were not reflected by measures of total daily ethanol intake. Experiment II exposed rats to extended 22 hr. stress sessions and each animal had four simultaneous fluid choices available: water, saccharin. 1% W/V, ethanol 5% V/V, and ethanol 10% V/V. Temporal intake patterns for both 5% and 10% ethanol showed pronounced peaks for the interval immediately following the shock schedule. A progressive shift of intake from 5% to 10% ethanol was also evidenced with increasing time under shock, while saccharin and water intake decreased. Blood ethanol levels during shock increased significantly from baseline for all animals and ranged from 30 to 162 mg/100 ml. The results are interpreted as a relationship between voluntary ethanol intake and escape from the consequences of stress.

Adaptation, Psychological

The effect of low dose intravenous alcohol on human information processing.

A model of multiple-stage information processing predicts alcohol to have a selective effect on mechanisms involving central processing rather than sensory input. However, behavioral effects at low alcohol doses administered orally can be overshadowed by fluctuations in gastrointestinal absorption and metabolism rate. Paid volunteers, who therefore received intravenous doses of alcohol and a barbiturate, were tested on tasks varying in sensory discriminability and in central processing difficulty. The low drug doses did not affect errors of stimulus encoding but increased error rate in memory comparison tasks. These results confirmed the predictions based on the mutiple-stage model.

Adult