Even a couple of glasses of wine a night can damage the brain and affect problem-solving skills in old age, a long-term study has found.
People who drank moderate amounts of alcohol were three times as likely to suffer the kind of brain atrophy that can be an early sign of dementia, researchers found. They said that people were kidding themselves if they thought a nightly drink would protect the brain and urged them to follow controversial lower alcohol guidelines set out by the chief medical officer last year. Men and women were urged not to drink more than 14 units a week.
Although heavy drinking is known to be bad for the brain, previous evidence on moderate amounts of alcohol was “murky”, said Anya Topiwala, of Oxford University, who led the latest study. She looked at 550 civil servants in Whitehall who were repeatedly tested over 30 years, finding that the more people drank, the bigger the risk of atrophy in an area of the brain known as the hippocampus.
“It is really important in memory and spatial navigation and it’s often atrophied in early Alzheimer’s disease; it’s one of the first regions of the brain to shrink,” Dr Topiwala said. “It’s certainly concerning at a relatively low level of consumption . . . brain changes appear years before symptoms and if we recall these patients in five years we may find more symptoms.”
Although most tests of thinking appeared unaffected, people who drank 14 to 21 units a week saw a 17 per cent greater decline in verbal fluency than teetotallers. This was tested by asking people to list as many words as they could beginning with the same letter in a minute and Dr Topiwala said it was a measure of much more important skills. “It’s a test of more complex cognitive tasks,” she said. “At more complex problem solving they may be less effective – crosswords, trying to fix things that are broken.”
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The study was published in the BMJ. Tom Dening, professor of dementia research at Nottingham University, said: “We probably need to think in a more sophisticated way about how we frame messages to middle-aged and older people who like a drink but may not think about alcohol in terms of causing subtle brain damage.”