Groundbreaking new study has bad news for anyone who drinks alcohol
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Westend61/Getty Images
Many people enjoy a drink, and while it's pretty universally accepted that drinking to excess is bad for you, it's also generally understood that moderation can't do any harm, right?
Wrong. That is according to a landmark new study by academics at Oxford, Yale, and Cambridge.
Using a massive sample size of around half a million adults, the study examined the effects of drinking on one particular aspect of human health.
One long-standing idea was that drinking in moderation is not harmful in the long term, and even that drinking small amounts of alcohol has some health benefits, most commonly a glass of red wine with dinner.
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But the new study has completely debunked this longstanding belief.
More than half a million adults aged between 56 and 72 participated in the study, which examined the long term effects of alcohol on brain health.
It found that even participants who were drinking small amounts, up to three drinks a week, had a heightened risk of dementia in the long term.
The overwhelming conclusion of the study was that any amount of alcohol makes you more vulnerable to dementia and can cause brain damage in the long term.
It also found that the more you drink the higher your risk.
So, there is still a difference between drinking in moderation and drinking to excess, but it's perhaps more accurate to think of it as 'less bad for you' rather than 'better for you'.
Anoopinder Singh is an author on the study, and shared the main dangers, saying: “The primary culprit is ethanol and its metabolite acetaldehyde. Ethanol alters neuronal signaling and sleep, while acetaldehyde drives oxidative stress and neuroinflammation.”
Alcohol can encourage inflammation, cause brain cells to die off more quickly, and disrupt systems in the body that are important for memory.
And while the risk is high for any gender, it's particularly high for women.
Of course, the vast majority of people who drink already do so knowing that it's bad for them, even in moderation, and simply saying what people already know is unlikely to cause any large scale social change in attitudes to drinking by itself.
But then just 30 years ago you could have said the same about smoking - in many countries these days, relatively very few people smoke tobacco and the habit is viewed in a largely negative light.
Meanwhile, non-alcoholic beers and spirits are already seeing an increase in popularity and many pubs now serve an alcohol free option on draft, which may signal a cultural shift.