Drinking is bad for your brain! The more you drink, the smaller your brain becomes and the earlier you age?

Is drinking alcohol good for your health?

not good.

Alcohol can cause cirrhosis of the liver, psychological problems, obesity and cardiovascular disease, and is closely related to various cancers.

Is a drink really just for pleasure?

No, a study in The Lancet shows that there is no so-called "safe dose" of alcohol intake: as long as you drink, your risk of cancer will increase. In addition to harming your body, alcohol can also cause permanent damage to your brain.

Drinking too little is harmful to your body and brain, and drinking too much is even worse.

Alcohol abuse can cause brain damage: Excessive alcohol intake is enough to change the structure of the brain, causing a decrease in gray and white matter throughout the brain, which may lead to cognitive impairment.

Is “moderate” drinking, such as a few beers or a bottle of liquor a week, harmless to the brain?

Then you might be totally wrong!

Recently, in a study published in Nature Communications, a research team from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a large-scale survey and analyzed the brain magnetic resonance imaging results of 36,000 people to estimate the gray matter and white matter volumes of different brain regions. The results showed that mild to moderate alcohol intake is also associated with a decrease in brain volume.

This suggests that the health hazards of alcohol to the brain may be more serious and widespread than we expected.

As alcohol consumption increased, the volume of the brain's gray and white matter decreased, and the more people drank, the worse it got.

The changes in brain volume in these people were not concentrated in one area of ​​the brain, but throughout the entire brain, similar to the aging brain.

Let’s take a look at how drinking specifically affects brain aging.

1. For people in their 50s, if they go from not drinking to consuming an average of one unit of alcohol per day, their brain will age by 0.5 years.

2. Increasing the daily alcohol intake from one unit to two units is equivalent to the brain aging by two years.

3. As intake increases, the brain also shows a trend of accelerated aging:

4. An increase from 2 units to 3 units is equivalent to the brain aging by 3.5 years.

5. In more extreme cases, going from no alcohol to consuming 4 units per day is equivalent to the brain aging by more than 10 years.

No matter what kind of wine it is, don't drink too much!

A certain celebrity or someone around you may have been drinking and is in great health, but this individual example is not enough to prove that the same miracle can happen to you.

Now, with the help of large-scale database analysis, we can reveal the close relationship between drinking and the brain.

Instead of deceiving yourself and satisfying your appetite, it is better to look at the data and then decide whether to drink or how much to drink. After all, your body is your own!

Daviet, R., Aydogan, G., Jagannathan, K. et al. Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. Nat Commun (2022).

doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28735-5

More alcohol, less brain: Penn-led study finds an association that begins with an average of just one drink a day. Retrieved Mar 4, 2022