Alcoholism and accompanying disorders explored at Guze Symposium

Research on alcoholism and disorders that tend to occur with it will be presented by national experts at the fifth annual Guze Symposium on Alcoholism.

The symposium is dedicated to the late Samuel B. Guze, M.D., a pioneer of the medical model of psychiatric illness and the field of alcoholism research, who served 18 years as vice chancellor for medical affairs and president of the Washington University Medical Center. He also was head of the School’s Department of Psychiatry.

The symposium is for health professionals, psychologists, social workers and educators. Participants may receive continuing medical education credits for attendance. The program is sponsored by the Office of Continuing Medical Education at Washington University School of Medicine and supported with major funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.

This year’s symposium will cover the relationship between alcohol and other psychiatric disorders that frequently accompany alcohol use and abuse — including social phobia, antisocial personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia.

“Alcoholism is often an extremely challenging illness to treat,” says Elliot C. Nelson, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine and co-organizer of the symposium, with Kathleen K. Bucholz, Ph.D., research professor of psychiatry. “By studying the relationships between alcoholism and these accompanying disorders, researchers can gain additional insight into the biological processes underlying these illnesses and provide clinicians with improved treatment strategies.”

The Guze Symposium is hosted by the Midwest Alcoholism Research Center (MARC) at Washington University in St. Louis. Created by a grant from the NIAAA, MARC is one of 15 Alcoholism Research Centers nationwide funded by the National Institutes of Health. It is the only center that focuses primarily on understanding the causes of adolescent alcohol problems.

MARC is housed at Washington University, but the center includes investigators from Saint Louis University, University of Missouri-Columbia, the Veterans Administration in St. Louis and Palo Alto, Calif., and Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia.