E.J. Zeef

Children of alcoholics: attention, information processing and event-related brain potentials

Recent studies on biological markers and risk factors for alcoholism have distinguished between nonalcoholic individuals with a family history of alcoholism and those without such a family history on measures of event‐related brain potentials. The main finding of these “high‐risk” studies is a smaller amplitude of the P300 component in males with a history of paternal alcoholism. This relationship between P300 amplitude and a family history of paternal alcoholism has been observed in adults and children. Consequently, several authors have suggested that a reduced P300 amplitude could serve as a vulnerability marker for alcoholism. We address several conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of event‐related potentials in children at high risk for alcoholism. Subsequently, the ongoing high‐risk study of the Amsterdam Institute for Addiction Research is described briefly.