Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Research
Defining the needs of adults with alcohol-related cognitive impairment
Project team
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It has been estimated that between 30-80% of individuals with an alcohol use disorder will experience some level of cognitive impairment.
Long-term, heavy alcohol consumption is known to affect cognition through a range of causal pathways. These include nutritional deficiencies, liver and cerebrovascular disorders, brain injury and direct neurotoxic effects of alcohol.
For many people, cognitive impairment is transient and improves over time in the absence of alcohol. For others, improvement will take longer and will require additional support and rehabilitation. Some people need long-term care. Alcohol can affect short and long-term memory, executive function - including planning, problem solving, and impulse control, visuospatial skills, reasoning and attention. It can also affect areas such as social cognition and apathy.
Cognitive impairment may prevent people from being able to access, engage with and maintain support from specialist alcohol treatment services.
Many people experiencing alcohol use disorder and at risk of experiencing alcohol-related cognitive impairment (ARCI) are thought to be found in acute hospital settings.
ARCI is significantly underdiagnosed, but there is strong evidence that the condition can be partially or fully reversed through prolonged cessation of alcohol consumption.
Finding the best way to identify ARCI early is crucial. Cognitive screening tools could help identify people with the condition. However, there is a lack of evidence about how useful existing cognitive screening tools are for identifying ARCI in hospital patients.
In addition, once identified people at-risk of ARCI need ongoing assessment, but currently very few assessment pathways for this condition exist, and none are present in the Humber region and North Yorkshire.
Our approach is to engage with service users with lived experience, their families, and key stakeholders and co-produce research to find interventions that are acceptable, effective and meet service-users' needs.
Our pilot work has shown that a high proportion of hospital inpatients with an alcohol use disorder experience cognitive difficulties.. This affects how people engage with care in hospital. It also demonstrates the need for an assessment pathway to determine whether these problems persist when people are no longer acutely unwell in hospital.
We are conducting a prospective screening, assessment and prevalence study to:
1. Explore whether a short cognitive screening tool administered in hospital to individuals with an alcohol use disorder can help identify people with an ARCI that persists after discharge from hospital.
2. Establish the prevalence of ARCI amongst recently hospitalised patients with an alcohol use disorder.
We are also exploring the use of electronic devices, data science, and wearable technology to support the delivery of our programme of research.
People with lived experience of alcohol use disorder and cognitive problems will be approached to participate in an advisory group and carer organisations are helping to identify cares to contribute to the work of this theme.
Our key stakeholder group is made up of representatives from key services including addiction, memory assessment and dementia services, mental health services, hospitals, criminal justice, social services, charities, commissioners and policymakers. This group will provide insights into care, commissioning and data sources.
Download the privacy notice here. For further information, contact CAMHR_YP@hull.ac.uk.