Drinking any amount of alcohol increases your risk of dementia later in life, according to a new study that challenges prior research findings.
Some research has suggested light drinking — such as fewer than seven drinks a week — may be more neuroprotective than no alcohol at all. Those studies, however, focused on older people and didn’t differentiate between former drinkers and lifelong nondrinkers, thus potentially skewing the results, study authors said.
In the new study, published Tuesday in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, researchers analyzed how certain genes linked to alcohol might impact how liquor consumption affects the brain.
“The genetic analyses results (showed) that even small amounts of alcohol could increase dementia risk,” said lead study author Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
Mendelian randomization also reduces the chance of reverse causation, such as dementia processes influencing drinking rather than the reverse, and it can also estimate the cumulative impact of alcohol consumption over a person’s entire life, Topiwala said. Observational studies, however, tend to capture a snapshot of mid- to late-life drinking habits, and depend on subject recall, which may not be accurate.
However, for people with less genetic risk for Alzheimer’s it often depends on “when” and “how” people drink, Isaacson added. For example, he said, two drinks before bed on an empty stomach several nights will have a more harmful effect on brain health compared with one drink a few times a week with an early dinner.
