If you drink one more glass of wine every day, your brain may age by 5 years, and your whole brain will atrophy.
Global science
The idea of "moderate drinking" has long been rooted in the hearts of the people, but at least to your brain, it may just be a lie.
It seems that drinking is enjoyable and harmful to one's health. Whether it is a gathering of friends, a wedding banquet or a work party, alcohol is often a member of the dinner table, and even people who do not like to drink will often take a few drinks in accordance with the atmosphere.
Alcohol (that is, ethanol) and its intermediate metabolite, acetaldehyde, are toxic. Therefore, it is self-evident that heavy drinking or even long-term drinking is harmful to people, and it has long been a consensus in the scientific community. A bulletin released by the World Heart Federation points out that about 230 diseases are related to alcohol intake.
Among them, everyone probably knows the effect of alcohol on the brain, and we have more or less seen people who become inarticulate, dizzy and stumble after drinking too much. In the long run, heavy drinking is one of the leading causes of dementia, cognitive impairment and memory impairment. For example, a 19-year follow-up study in the United States found that people with a history of alcohol use disorders (patients who develop alcohol dependence or alcohol abuse) have a 120% and 80% higher risk of severe memory impairment and severe cognitive impairment, respectively.
Not only that, but long-term heavy drinking has another blow to our brains-brain atrophy, but also overall atrophy. After analyzing a number of studies, scholars at the University of Oxford found that long-term heavy drinking will lead to complete atrophy of gray matter and white matter of the brain, cerebellum atrophy, and hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus and other structures will also be affected.
The doubt of "moderate drinking"
Back to the beginning of the topic, if only a little, or the so-called "moderate drinking", is there no harm to the brain? scientists have not been able to agree on this point. On the one hand, different studies have come to different conclusions. Some studies have found that moderate drinking is also associated with brain atrophy, but some studies have not found such a link, and some studies have even suggested that moderate drinking is good for brain health. for example, it may reduce the risk of dementia. On the other hand, there is no unified definition of what "moderation" is, and the amount of alcohol consumed in different studies may even double.
Perhaps because of this, people have become accustomed not to see moderate drinking as a health threat. Even in some countries' official health guidelines, moderate drinking is not given a red light. For example, according to the Dietary guidelines for American residents (2020-2025), if alcohol is needed, men's daily pure alcohol intake should be limited to 28 grams, while women should be halved to 14 grams-the equivalent of one bottle and half a bottle of beer, respectively. The British government recommends that adults' weekly pure alcohol intake should not exceed 140 milliliters, or an average of 16 grams per day.
However, the latest research is challenging conventional wisdom. Moderate drinking may also be at risk, at least in terms of brain atrophy. A 30-year follow-up study in the UK found that even "moderate" drinkers who consumed 112 to 168 grams of pure alcohol per week (an average of 16 to 24 grams per day) had a 3.4 times higher risk of atrophy of the right hippocampus than non-drinkers.
Such research is not an isolated case, but similar studies generally have some problems, such as small sample size, not excluding the influence of interference factors and so on. In a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications, British researchers once again targeted "moderate drinking". They analyzed MRI images of the brains of more than 36000 people, more than 2900 of whom did not drink alcohol, in the hope of finding a more general pattern of the link between alcohol and brain atrophy.
After controlling for variables such as age, sex and ethnicity, they found a negative correlation between alcohol intake and brain structure, the most obvious being that alcohol consumption was associated with overall brain shrinkage. If you translate this shrinkage into the number of years of brain aging, it is also 50 years old, and the average daily consumption of 40 milliliters of pure alcohol shrinks to the same extent as the brain ages by more than 10 years, compared with people who do not drink alcohol.
More is less.
A more worrying finding is that brain atrophy is not limited to heavy drinkers: other things being equal, brain atrophy is more pronounced in people who drink more alcohol, and among those who drink less. And the greater the amount of alcohol consumed, the faster the degree of aging increases, somewhat similar to the exponential growth trend.
Let's take a 50-year-old as an example: the brain of a person who consumes an average of 20 milliliters of pure alcohol a day is 2 years older than a person who consumes an average of 10 milliliters a day; if he consumes another 10 milliliters, the degree of shrinkage will be equivalent to an additional 3.5 years of aging; another 10 milliliters will be equivalent to nearly 5 years old on the previous basis.
It is worth mentioning that 10 ml of pure alcohol is only equivalent to the alcohol content of a small can of beer (330 ml, 3 degrees).
Their analysis also found that for gray matter, atrophy is more "balanced", not particularly prominent in certain tiny brain regions, but in all parts of the brain. However, there are some gray matter areas that are more noteworthy, and the atrophy is relatively severe, mainly located in three areas of the cerebral cortex (frontal lobe related to motor function, mental activity and smell, parietal lobe related to sensory function, and insular cortex related to emotional and physical dynamic balance). There are also brainstem (related to the maintenance of basic life activities such as heartbeat and breathing), putamen (related to motor control) and amygdala (related to emotional and emotional regulation, learning and memory, etc.). In addition, gray matter atrophy is also obvious in the temporal lobe (related to hearing and memory) and cingulate area (related to autonomous response, body movement, etc.).
Judging from this new study, alcohol seems to have a comprehensive effect on our brains. Of course, it is worth noting that this study is only observational, revealing correlation rather than causality, and does not mean that drinking actually leads to brain atrophy. In theory, causality may even be the opposite, that is, brain atrophy causes people to drink more alcohol. Further basic research is needed to explain whether alcohol really causes brain atrophy.
To say the least, if alcohol does cause brain atrophy, how does it work and cause brain damage? scientists have offered a lot of explanations for this. For example, alcohol itself is neurotoxic, which may lead to increased transmembrane calcium influx of neurons and neuronal excitotoxicity; alcohol can also damage the liver, resulting in the blood of ammonia, manganese and other neurotoxic substances can not be removed in time, thus indirectly damaging the brain. Other studies have shown that alcohol may increase the content of homocysteine in the body, which is related to oxidative stress, apoptosis and excitotoxicity, so it may play an intermediary role in alcohol-induced brain atrophy.
Optimal intake
In 2018, the Lancet published what is arguably the largest drinking study in history. The more than 20-year study of 28 million drinkers aged 15 to 95 in 195 countries and regions found that alcohol is harmful regardless of intake, and the best amount of alcohol to drink is 0.
Although popular perception is difficult to change in a short period of time, it may take a while to accept new scientific ideas, and there may be a lag in t
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