Study Reveals Alcohol's Harmful Effect on the Brain Even for Moderate Drinkers
Excessive alcohol intake is harmful to the body; that's a given. It is known to lead to a multitude of negative health effects like cancer as well as adverse brain outcomes including poor brain health and cognitive decline. As a result, doctors recommend moderate drinking that is limited to a glass of wine or a bottle of beer a day.
But a new long-term study on the effects of low-level drinking on the brain vis-à-vis cognitive performance indicates that drinking, even in moderate amounts, can cause brain damage and can lead to short-term impairment. This is what experts of the University of Oxford and the University College of London learned.
Researchers collated data from the Whitehall II cohort study which measured how much a person drank over 30 years beginning 1985. The 550 men and women volunteers weren't addicted to alcohol. They were queried every five years, and their brains were scanned by magnetic resonance imaging at the end of the study.
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Expectedly, those who drank 30 units of alcohol per week had a significantly higher risk of having atrophy or shrinking in the region of the brain called the hippocampus, the most critical area for learning and memory, particularly verbal and spatial. The effect is greater on the right side of the brain.
Surprisingly, however, they also found a negative impact on cognitive function and harmful changes to brain structure for those who drank only 14–21 units a week. This means that light drinking also increases the risk of adverse brain outcomes and a steeper decline in cognitive skills.
The findings are important considering it was suggested earlier that moderate drinking lowers the risk of early death from Alzheimer's disease by 77 percent. It's not the alcohol itself that has a protective effect on the brain, scientists claimed, but the act of socializing more with other people.
