Acute Alterations on DTI Caused by Alcohol Consumption: Region of Interest–Based Diffusion Tensor Analysis Limited Because of Poor Reproducibility with the Additional Detrimental Effects of a Small Population Size and Minute Changes

摘要

I read the article by Kong et al titled “Acute Effects of Alcohol on the Human Brain: Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study” in the May 2012 issue of AJNR with great interest.1 The authors reported novel findings on the world's oldest and most widely used recreational drug, ethanol, and demonstrated that it leads to some detectable alterations on DTI compared with baseline even after small to moderate amounts (for a regular drinker) of consumption. This report happens to serve as the first article in this field demonstrating DTI changes besides those well-known effects of ethanol on the CNS detectable by other tests. Their findings are extremely interesting, not only in a way linking alcohol consumption to diffusion weighted imaging (which has the same abbreviation as “driving while impaired”); but also the results presented in the article carry a potential for huge implications if validated with future studies. Nevertheless, their findings seem to be somewhat contradictory to what is known so far and extremely questionable as a result of methodologic weaknesses. I would like to address several issues regarding their DTI methodology as well as point out some objections about how the results were evaluated.