There's Probably No 'Safe' Level Of Drinking, Dementia Study Finds

Red wineYou might have heard that a little bit of red wine is good for your heart, or that those who drink moderately have better health outcomes than non-drinkers. But in his book How To Prevent Dementia, Dr Richard Restak, a neurologist, pointed out that there are flaws in some of this research. Calling alcohol a “direct neurotoxin,” he said that it’s important to remember that nondrinking participants in these studies might have been “advised either by professionals or family members that they should decrease their alcohol intake.” So, “it seems reasonable to assume that they were abusing alcohol to a greater or lesser extent” at some point – just one way the result could be skewed.Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that a new dementia study published in the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine found “no protective effects of low levels of alcohol intake”.What did the study find?This research looked at 559,559 participants from the US Million Veteran Program (MVP) and the UK Biobank (UKB). They were aged between 56-72 at the start of the study and were monitored for an average of four years (MVP) and 12 years (UKB). They were all asked to fill in questionnaires about their drinking habits. Over 90% said they drank sometimes at the start of the research.By the end of the study, 14,540 people developed dementia.Compared to light drinkers, non-drinkers and heavy drinkers seemed to have a 41% higher risk of dementia.This appeared to confirm the U-shaped findings you might have heard about: ie, that both never drinking and drinking heavily are linked to a higher risk. But this was only observational data. Researchers also used genetic analysis, which showed “no evidence supporting a protective effect at any consumptionlevel”.Why did the Mendelian randomisation change the results?Speaking to HuffPost UK, the study’s lead author, Dr Anya Topiwala, explained: “Mendelian randomisation (the genetic analyses we used) is a method that uses genetic differences to find out if one thing actually causes another. For example, some people have genes that make them drink less alcohol.” This would hint at more of a causal effect (one change, like drinking alcohol, leading to a certain result, like increased dementia risk) than a correlation (merely pointing out that people with X habits had Y result, which does not always mean the behaviour and the outcome are related). “If those people also have a lower risk of dementia, it suggests that alcohol may play a direct role in causing dementia – not just be linked to it through other lifestyle factors,” Dr Topiawala said.“Because genes are randomly assigned at birth, this approach works like a natural version of a randomised trial, so we can make stronger conclusions about cause and effect.” The researchers used two types of Mendelian testing, the first “comprising cohorts around the world (including UK Biobank and Million Veteran Program)”.The second (‘nonlinear’) genetic analyses “tried to examine the shape of the relationship between genetically predicted alcohol and dementia risk, to answer the question about whether moderate and heavy drinking had differential effects.” For this, they used the MPV data.After all of these tests had been considered, the scientists found the link between dementia risk and drinking seemed more straightforward: more alcohol meant more risk.The researchers concluded, “Our study findings support a detrimental effect of all types of alcohol consumption on dementia risk, with no evidence supporting the previously suggested protective effect of moderate drinking.”Related...This Much Reading May Reduce Dementia RiskHere's How Many Steps To Walk A Day To Lower Your Dementia RiskWhat Is Frontotemporal Dementia, The Condition Bruce Willis Is Diagnosed With?

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