Information processing speed in ecstasy (MDMA) users

✍ Scribed by Michelle Wareing; John E. Fisk; Catharine Montgomery; Philip N. Murphy; Martin D. Chandler

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 101 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/hup.827

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Previous research draws parallels between ecstasy‐related and age‐related deficits in cognitive functioning. Age‐related impairments in working memory have been attributed to a slow down in information processing speed. The present study compared 29 current ecstasy users, 10 previous users and 46 non‐users on two tests measuring information processing speed and a computation span task measuring working memory. Results showed that ecstasy users performed worse than non‐ecstasy users in the letter comparison task although the overall difference was not significant (p = 0.089). Results from the pattern recognition task showed that current ecstasy users produced significantly more errors than the other two groups (p < 0.01). When results were combined for both the letter and pattern tasks, once again current ecstasy users produced significantly more errors than non‐ecstasy users (p < 0.01). Working memory deficits obtained were statistically significant with both ecstasy using groups performing significantly worse than non‐users on the computation span measure (p < 0.01). Moreover, ANCOVA with measures of processing speed as covariates failed to eliminate the group difference in computation span (p < 0.01). Therefore, it is likely the mechanism responsible for impairments in the computation span measure is not the same as that in elderly adults where processing speed generally removes most of the age‐related variance. Also of relevance is the fact that the ecstasy users reported here had used a range of other drugs making it difficult to unambiguously attribute the results obtained to ecstasy use. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.