This is your brain on alcohol — and it’s not good
Declines found even in moderate drinkers
Here’s one more reason to think before you drink: Even moderate alcohol consumption might be bad for aging brains.
A study published Tuesday in the medical journal BMJ found moderate drinkers who were followed for 30 years were more likely than abstainers or light drinkers to develop brain changes that might precede or accompany memory loss. They also were more likely to show rapid slippage on one language test, though not on other cognitive tests.
Moderate drinking in the British study was defined at a level that, in the United States, would equal 8 to 12 small glasses of wine, bottles of beer or shots of liquor each week.
“Many people drink this way,” and previous studies have suggested they might actually be helping their brains, said lead researcher Anya Topiwala, a clinical lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Oxford. The new study casts doubt on that idea.
Topiwala and her colleagues examined three decades of records from 527 British civil servants who are part of a long- running health study. The volunteers, who are predominantly white middle- class men, took brief cognitive tests and recorded their drinking histories starting at an average age of 43.
The researchers brought the volunteers in for brain scans, repeated the tests and administered amore extensive battery of tests.
Light to moderate drinkers and abstainers performed similarly, with one exception: Moderate to heavy drinkers showed more rapid declines on a language fluency test that gives people a minute to name as many words as they can beginning with a particular letter.
Brain scans also showed differences. The heaviest drinkers were most likely to have clear shrinkage of a part of the brain called the hippocampus, a change that can precede or accompany dementia. Even moderate drinkers were three times more likely than abstainers to show such shrinkage.
A caveat: The study is observational, so it cannot prove cause and effect. It is possible that frequent drinkers had other things in common that accounted for the brain and language changes.