NCJ Number
129515
Journal
Comprehensive Psychiatry Volume: 31 Issue: 4 Dated: (July/August 1990) Pages: 369-375
Date Published
1990
Length
7 pages
Annotation
A variety of cognitive tasks were investigated in a sample of 33 native Bahamian cocaine abuse patients who had been abstinent for up to 3 months.
Abstract
The patients were housed in a locked ward of Nassau's Sandilands Rehabilitation Center/Cocaine Treatment Unit with strict visiting privileges and urine screening procedures to carefully monitor abstinence. There was no evidence of cocaine abuse among the 21 control subjects matched for age, sex, and education. Each subject completed a questionnaire about cocaine use followed by an interview focusing on the questionnaire and reported symptoms, symptomatology assessments, and tests of a range of cognitive abilities. Hospital records were reviewed to corroborate and detail medical, psychiatric, and drug histories. Abstinent cocaine abusers showed no differences from control subjects for most tasks, but two tasks involving short-term auditory recall revealed deficiencies among cocaine abusers. In a visuospatial learning and recall task, there was evidence of superior performance among abstinent cocaine abusers compared to controls. 35 references (Author abstract modified)