Moderate drinking may alter brain

Drinking in moderation can help our health, some research has showed. Many doctors recommend a glass of wine or beer a night as part of diet plans such as
the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, which have been proven to keep your heart and brain healthy. However, a new study suggests that even moderate drinking may not be great for your brain.

As part of the study, which was published Wednesday in the BMJ, researchers looked at people's weekly alcohol intake from the Whitehall II study, which tracks disease and social behaviors in a group of British civil servants for 30 years. University of Oxford and University College London scientists studied how participants fared with regular brain function tests and an MRI.

What they noted was that the people who drank the most had the highest risk of hippocampal atrophy, a form of brain damage that can impact spatial navigation and can be associated with memory-loss conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia. The heavier drinkers saw a faster decline in language skills and had poorer white matter integrity, which is crucial to processing thoughts quickly.

Some studies have shown that the brains of heavier drinkers change over time, and not in a good way, but this research suggests that the brains of even moderate drinkers were changing, too. They also had a higher risk of hippocampal atrophy than those who didn't report any drinking at all.

If you're starting to worry and are afraid to drown your sorrows, note that there are many caveats, and more research needs to be done. Some experts suggest you shouldn't change your drinking behavior based on this one study, but the results of these brain scans and memory tests for moderate and lighter drinkers were not what researchers expected.

"We were surprised that the light to moderate drinkers didn't seem to have that protective effect," said study co-author Dr. Anya Topiwala, a clinical lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. "These are people who are drinking at levels that many consider social drinkers, so they are not consuming a lot."

Even the heaviest of the drinkers aren't big nightly bingers. The "drank the most" group in this study consumed about 30 units of alcohol a week, with a unit considered to be 10 milliliters or 8 grams of pure alcohol. A medium glass of wine has about two units of alcohol, and so does a pint of some beers, depending on the alcohol content.

If you do the boozy math, the study's heaviest drinkers had a little more than two medium glasses of wine or two beers every night of the week.

The moderate group was drinking about 14 to 21 units of alcohol per week, or about a medium glass of wine each night, plus a little extra on the weekends

Researchers discovered that the moderate group was three times more likely to have hippocampal atrophy compared with people who didn't drink at all. However, in the heavy and moderate drinkers, there is no evidence to show how clinically significant this change is, and there is no evidence linking this loss to any negative general cognitive effects, even the ones for which the participants were tested.

With the light drinkers, those who had a small glass of wine a night or up to seven units per week, researchers didn't see a significant difference compared with the abstainers, but they didn't see any protective qualities, either.

The abstainers may be one subject that needs further development, according to Eric Rimm, a professor of medicine and director for the program in cardiovascular epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Rimm, who was not involved in the new study, has researched the impact of alcohol for years. He said that although the study has an interesting hypothesis, the abstainer group (22 men and 15 women) is tiny and may be throwing off the results.

If you are a moderate drinker, he said, you don't have to give up the booze based solely on this report.