Researchers say that female alcoholics perform worse than men on tests designed to gauge cognitive damage caused by drinking, Reuters reported April 23.

Study author Barbara Flannery from RTI International and colleagues compared brain-function test results from 78 alcoholic men and 24 alcoholic women ages 18-40; 68 nonalcoholic men and women were used as a control group. The study was conducted in Russia.

Female alcoholics did worse than men on tests involving visual working memory, cognitive flexibility, spatial planning, and problem solving, even though the alcoholic men had, on average, been drinking significantly longer than the women.

"Women are vulnerable to the extent to which they will experience the negative consequences of alcohol abuse and alcoholism more rapidly than men, but men will also experience it -- the same kinds of effects," said Flannery.

The greater impairment suffered by women may be due to differences in how they metabolize alcohol, the researchers said.

The study was published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.