Further Reason To Party This Weekend

Alcohol may help mind stay sharp
A drink a day slows mental decline, study says

By JOHN FAUBERjfauber@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Jan. 19, 2005

The study is one of the most comprehensive looks yet at an issue that is gathering urgency as America ages: Are there ways to prevent the cognitive decline that often comes with old age?
Monitoring the drinking histories of 11,102 nurses for nearly 20 years, researchers found that light to moderate drinking of any kind of alcoholic beverage reduced the risk of mental decline by more than 20%, compared with abstinence.
Essentially, their brains were the cognitive equivalent of being 1.5 years younger.
"I recommend moderate drinking," said lead author Meir Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Noting that alcohol also has been showed to benefit cardiovascular health, Stampfer said his only reservation about making such a recommendation was if a person had alcohol abuse problems or a family history of abuse.
Although the study involved only women, Stampfer said he believed the results most likely applied to men as well. In fact, some research suggests that men get a slightly bigger benefit from drinking, especially to their cardiovascular health, he said.
The research, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to a couple of large, European studies that found a reduced risk of dementia in drinkers, said Diana Kerwin, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics and gerontology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
"You get a benefit up to (the point of) excessive alcohol intake," she said. "Alcohol is not bad."
However, Kerwin said people need to understand what moderate drinking means.
In most studies, that translates into one drink a day or two at the most.
"We've had patients who filled a highball glass with wine and had two a night," she said. "Well, that's like six glasses of wine."
Alcohol can magnify common problems often encountered by older people such as vision impairment and falling, she said.
And alcohol abuse or overuse has been shown to have the opposite effect on the brain as moderate drinking. It can lead to cognitive decline.
To measure the impact of alcohol on the brain, Harvard researchers followed a group of women aged 70 to 81 who were part of the ongoing Nurses' Health Study. Their drinking habits were measured six timesbetween 1980 and 1998.
They also were given various cognitive tests between 1995 and 2001.
Those who drank more than one gram and less than 15 grams of alcohol a day (15 grams is equivalent to about five ounces of wine, 12 ounces of beer or one standard drink with liquor) were more than 20% less likely to have cognitive decline than non-drinkers.
Those who drank between 15 grams and 30 grams had nearly as much reduction in risk, although in a few measures of mental ability the benefit was slightly reduced compared with those who drank less than 15 grams.
Alcoholic beverages such as red wine and beer, and even liquor, seem to have a variety of ways of helping maintain brain health.
Many researchers believe the primary effect is very similar to the way alcohol benefits the heart. Alcohol tends to raise HDL cholesterol, the good kind. It also can help prevent clotting and inflammation.
All those benefits improve the health of blood vessels in the brain, resulting in fewer so-called mini strokes, which kill brain cells but may not result in a noticeable decline in mental ability for several years.
In addition, moderate alcohol consumption may also increase the release of acetylcholine, a chemical produced in the brain that is crucial to memory.
Still, many doctors are not ready to recommend moderate drinking as a way to prevent mental decline.
"Preventing cognitive decline in old age as well as the conditions underlying it is one of the major public health challenges of the 21st century," according to an editorial accompanying the study. "Over enthusiasm for a potentially preventive measure, however, can be risky . . ."
One potential flaw in the observational study is that older people in good cognitive and physical health may be more likely to engage in moderate drinking, according to the editorial by Denis Evans and Julia Bienias, researchers with Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
People who want to maintain their mental ability in old age should understand that alcohol consumption "can be a double-edged sword, with the dangers of overindulgence being all too familiar," they wrote.