Alcohol and the Brain: Healthy or Harmful?
According to a few recent studies, if taken in little doses alcohol may actually protect your brain against dementia and cognitive decline. While too much alcohol consumption as in the cases of alcoholics is found to be related to heart diseases and cancers, low to moderate alcohol is claimed to have certain benefits, like preventing strokes, heart disease, and mental diseases.
A recent Italian study shows that small amounts of alcohol daily can have a positive impact on dementia and cognitive functions and there are other articles that do not find any beneficial effects at all on the brain. The way it works is the claim that low amounts of alcohol protect against cognitive impairment and dementia is only when certain conditions are met, such as the type of alcohol being wine, having a specific genetic disposition, not smoking and having normal levels of cholesterol and hypertension.
And the Chinese researchers in the European Journal of Epidemiology that worked on a total of 20 articles that involved more than 175k participants and 6400 cases and they found a non-linear association between the alcohol consumption and dementia risk and the maximum amount is specified as 12.5 grams per day, which is just a little over a glass. They found the wine to be a lot more beneficial than spirits and consuming three to four glasses each day was found to be quite risky for dementia.
In another study where American experts that studied the impact of alcohol consumption on cognitive functioning and brain volume of those without a history of alcoholism or dementia, observed enhanced memory function in these senior adults that are moderate drinkers. Two glasses a day for men and a glass per day for women over the age of 60 was found to be linked to the larger hippocampus and better episodic memory (memory of autobiographical events). Their younger age drinking was not found to have any impact on hippocampus volume and cognitive functioning at a later age.
Another study indicated that two or three glasses of wine each day could decrease the premature death risk from early Alzheimer’s disease, which may also be because of a better quality of life and longer life. Those who had one to three glasses per day through young, middle and old age had a less chance of suffering from mental diseases than those who didn’t drink at all. To summarize, a glass of wine a day can be very good for you but if you drink excessively you have a much higher chance of suffering from mental and a variety of other illnesses- liver, heart, and cancer.
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