Even if you’d consider yourself someone who only drinks in moderation, you may want to call it an early night.
That’s because such alcohol consumption has been linked to changes in aging brains that could lead to a decline in brain health, according to a new BMJ study. This decline could be a sign of potential memory loss down the line, not to mention “rapid slippage on a language test,” reports USA Today.
The researchers, from the University of Oxford and University College London, looked to see if moderate alcohol consumption was linked to a beneficial or harmful effect on brain structure and function, or had no effect at all.
Data for the study came out of a long-term health study of 10,000 British adults that’s looking at the impact of social and economic factors on health.. These researchers singled out 550 healthy men and women from the study for weekly alcohol intake and mental health performance reported over a 30-year period, from 1985 to 2015. Age, sex, physical and social activity, smoking and other factors were taken into account.
More alcohol consumption during this 30-year period was linked to a higher risk of brain damage related to memory and spatial navigation. The greatest risk was for those who had more than 30 units of alcohol per week as opposed to those who didn’t drink. For the study, moderate drinking was considered just 14 to 21 units a week — defined as 8 to 12 glasses of alcohol per week in the U.S., notes USA Today — and that level still meant a three-times-as-likely risk.
“We all use rationalizations to justify persistence with behaviors not in our long term interest,” Killian Welch, a Royal Edinburgh Hospital neuropsychiatrist who didn’t work on the research, wrote in an editorial along with the study. “With (these results) justification of ‘moderate’ drinking on the grounds of brain health becomes a little harder.”
The study was just an observational one, meaning no cause and effect determinations can be made. Also, none of this means that people have to quit drinking cold (Wild) turkey.
“You don’t have to feel that you have to completely quit drinking to have a healthy lifestyle,” Brian Downer, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, told USA Today. He also didn’t contribute to the study.
But the study does bring up a question of how much drinking is actually safe. U.K. guidelines say people shouldn’t have more than 14 units of alcohol per week, or six pints of a typical strength beer, reports Express.
“Our findings support the recent reduction in UK safe limits and call into question the current US guidelines, which suggest that up to 24.5 units a week is safe for men, as we found increased odds of hippocampal atrophy at just 14-21 units a week, and we found no support for a protective effect of light consumption on brain structure,” according to the researchers. The hippocampus is the part of the brain important for memory.
Light drinking has seen a stronger bout of criticism in recent days. Another new study found women who moderately drank during pregnancy could alter their baby’s faces.
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Only Drinking in Moderation? It Could Still Affect Your Brain Health originally appeared on usnews.com
