Moderate Drinking Can Damage the Brain, Claim Researchers (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol can damage the brain and impair cognitive function over time, researchers have claimed. Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the University of Oxford and University College London, describe how they followed the alcohol intake and cognitive performance of 550 men and women over 30 years from 1985. At the end of the study the team took MRI scans of the participants' brains. None of the participants were deemed to have an alcohol dependence, but levels of drinking varied. After excluding 23 participants due to gaps in data or other issues, the team looked at participants' alcohol intake as well as their performance on various cognitive tasks, as measured at six points over the 30 year period. The team also looked at the structure of the participants' brains, as shown by the MRI scan, including the structure of the white matter and the state of the hippocampus -- a seahorse-shaped area of the brain associated with memory. After taking into account a host of other factors including age, sex, social activity and education, the team found that those who reported higher levels of drinking were more often found to have a shrunken hippocampus, with the effect greater for the right side of the brain. While 35% of those who didn't drink were found to have shrinkage on the right side of the hippocampus, the figure was 65% for those who drank on average between 14 and 21 units a week, and 77% for those who drank 30 or more units a week.

Comments

Or just bored drinking

[Anonymous Coward]

i.e. people who have nothing to do can drink alcohol, and its the lack of stimulation on the brain that is the cause.

Whereas people who have something to do (e.g. somewhere to go, a night job, etc.) have more mental stimulation, but less times when they can drink.

Re:Perhaps something more complex is involved

[TimothyHollins]

Well no, not even close. Epidemiologically we do not know everything that leads to drinking, nor everything that drinking leads to, which means we have unknown confounders in a complex system. Over 30 years those confounders will grow to a massive interference level.

Consider this conundrum that caused a lot of panic in the early days of epidemiology. Does drinking cause lung cancer? The answer was a surprising yes. Every study came up positive.
Today, we know that to be false. Why? Because drinkers also tend to be smokers. When you control for smoking and keeping company with smokers, the effect goes away completely. That is what we call a confounder.

Now we see that moderate drinking leads to hippocampal shrinkage. Does that mean drinking is the problem? Not necessarily. As TFS says, they did control for a host of things, but were those ALL the relevant things? The answer is usually no.
Over a period of 30 years things change, ALOT. The lifestyles of the subjects change, their exposure to various environmental effects change, their hormonal setups change. What if drinkers tend to be more social? Just that single difference would introduce them to a whole host of different exposures when compared to non-drinkers, and none of those exposures would have anything to do with drinking itself.

There is no doubt an association between hipppocampal shrinkage and drinking, but what that association consists of is less certain. That is why the original point stands.

Or maybe...

[zifn4b]

They turned to drinking to cope with dealing with stupid people at their work and the real cause of the problem is that they lost brain cells from dealing with said stupid people.