Where's the wine? Heavy social drinkers show attentional bias towards alcohol in a visual conjunction search task.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Research indicates that high consumers of alcohol exhibit attentional bias (AB) towards alcohol-related cues, suggestive of a cognitive mechanism that might drive substance seeking. Many tasks that measure AB (e.g. visual probe, addiction Stroop), however, are limited by their reliance on non-appetitive control cues, the serial presentation of stimuli and their poor internal reliability. The current study employed a visual conjunction search (VCS) task capable of presenting multiple alcoholic and non-alcoholic appetitive cues simultaneously to assess whether social drinkers attend selectively to alcoholic stimuli. To assess the construct validity of this task, we examined whether alcohol consumption and related problems, subjective craving and drinking motives predict alcohol-specific AB. DESIGN AND SETTING: A VCS task was performed in a laboratory setting, which required participants to detect the presence of appetitive alcoholic (wine, beer) and non-alcoholic (cola, lemonade) targets within arrays of matching and non-matching distractors. PARTICIPANTS: Data from 99 participants were assessed [meanage  = 20.77, standard deviation (SD) = 2.98; 64 (65%) females], with 81.8% meeting the threshold for harmful alcohol consumption (meanAUDIT  = 12.89, SD = 5.79). MEASUREMENTS: Self-reports of alcohol consumption and related problems [Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)], subjective craving (Alcohol Craving Questionnaire Short Form) and drinking motives (Drinking Motives Questionnaire Short Form) were obtained, and the VCS task measured response times for the correct detection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic targets. FINDINGS: Participants were significantly quicker to detect alcoholic relative to non-alcoholic appetitive targets (P < 0.001, dz  = 0.41), which was predicted positively by AUDIT scores (P = 0.013, R2  = 0.06%). The VCS task achieved excellent reliability (α > 0.79), superior to other paradigms. CONCLUSIONS: The visual conjunction search task appears to be a highly reliable method for assessing alcohol-related attentional bias, and shows that heavy social drinkers prioritize alcoholic cues in their immediate environment.

Comparison of the correlation of the Selvester QRS scoring system with cardiac contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging-measured acute myocardial infarct size in patients with and without thrombolytic therapy.

BACKGROUND: After an acute myocardial infarction (MI), it is important to define the infarct size because it is related to mortality and morbidity. The Selvester QRS Score is an electrocardiographic (ECG) method that has been developed for estimating MI size. It has been shown to correlate well with postmortem anatomically measured sizes of single MI in patients who did not receive thrombolytic therapy. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that correlation between Selvester QRS Score-estimated MI size and contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (ceMRI)-measured MI size is equivalent in patients who did vs those who did not receive thrombolytic therapy. METHODS: Thirty-six patients with MI (24 with thrombolytic therapy and 12 without) received ceMRI and ECG at admission and at 1 or 6 months after admission. Indeed, in 23 of the patients, the therapy was intravenous only. The Selvester QRS Score was calculated using the 1-month ECG or, if not available, the 6-month ECG. The correlation between the 2 measures of MI size was determined for all patients and for the 2 groups separately. RESULTS: The mean MI size in the group that did not receive thrombolytic therapy was 8.5% +/- 6.4% estimated by the Selvester QRS Score and 11.7% +/- 10.2% measured by ceMRI. For the group that received thrombolytic therapy, Selvester QRS Score was 13.9% +/- 11.1% and ceMRI was 20.2% +/- 11.3%. The mean MI size in both groups combined was 12.1% +/- 10.0% estimated by the Selvester QRS Score and 17.3% +/- 11.5% measured by ceMRI. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient between Selvester QRS Score and ceMRI was 0.74 (P < .0001) for all patients, 0.74 (P < .0001) for the group that received thrombolytic therapy, and 0.64 (P = .024) for the group that did not receive thrombolytic therapy. CONCLUSIONS: The associations between Selvester QRS Score and ceMRI-based MI were statistically significant and similar in both groups.