Just one liter of beer or an average glass of wine a day can start to shrink the entire volume of the brain, a new study has found. In view of the fact that Slovenians are at the top of the world in terms of consumed alcohol, we can be rightly worried.
On average, people aged 50 who drank a liter of beer or a glass of wine (two alcohol units) a day in the past month had brains that appeared to be two years older than those who drank only half a beer (one unit ), according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature.
The brains of people of that age who said they drank three units of alcohol a day had a reduction in white and gray matter that looked like they had added 3.5 years to their brain age. One alcohol unit is 10 milliliters or 8 grams of pure alcohol. This means that 25 milliliters or a single dose of alcoholic drink is one unit; so a can of beer is two units; and a standard glass of wine (175 milliliters) represents two units. A study showed that the brains of people who do not drink alcohol, who consumed an average of only one unit of alcohol per day, showed brain aging equivalent to half a year. In comparison, drinking four units of alcohol a day aged a person's brain by more than 10 years.
"It's not linear. The more you drink, the worse it is," first study author Remi Daviet, an assistant professor at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. "The problem with this study is that they only have information on people's drinking for a year before the (brain) imaging," said alcohol researcher Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington. "I think this is a major limitation of the study, as it is likely that cumulative alcohol consumption over the course of a lifetime is related to the brain, not just the level of consumption immediately before the shot," she added. "The relationship between alcohol and health is complex and our understanding of this relationship is evolving over time. I would not actually draw any definitive conclusions based on this study, but I would say that the authors have identified areas for further research.”
A myth about the benefits of alcohol?
Doctors used to believe that moderate amounts of alcohol could have health benefits, especially for the heart and brain, but recent research has called this assumption into question. Numerous studies have shown that no amount of drinking is healthy, and the World Heart Association recently published a policy report saying that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health”. "Small amounts of alcohol are associated with health benefits for some conditions, such as ischemic heart disease and diabetes, but harm for others, such as traffic accidents and breast cancer," Gakidou said, adding that there are others such as brain stroke where the outcome is not clear. "There really is no simple answer for any individual," she said. "Based on what we know at this point, whether small amounts of alcohol are beneficial or harmful to an individual depends on that person's health and risk profile. … Are they more prone to certain heart diseases or cancers?”
Is your brain really shrinking?
The report analyzed data from more than 36,000 people who took part in the UK Biobank study, which holds in-depth genetic and health information on more than 500,000 middle-aged adults living in the UK. People in the study provided information on the number of drinks they had consumed each week in the previous year, after which they underwent an MRI scan of the brain. The researchers compared their recordings to images of typical aging brains and then controlled for variables such as age, sex, smoking status, socioeconomic status, genetic background and overall head size. "Having such a large sample size allows us to find subtle patterns, even between drinking the equivalent of half a beer and one beer a day," co-author Gideon Nave, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said in a statement. "Having this data set is like having a microscope or a telescope with a stronger lens," Nave said. "You get better resolution and you start to see patterns and associations that you couldn't before." The study managed to find a more pronounced pattern of association between drinking and brain volume than previous studies. However, he added that the results were just that - a link - as the study could not prove cause and effect. "Our study is by far the largest research on this topic," Nave said.
adapted from CCN
