Alcohol and the risk of dementia

The brains of participants who were drinking three units of alcohol a day over the previous month had reductions in both white and gray matter, making their brains appear three and a half years older. For reference, one unit is considered a half pint of beer or a small glass of wine. Find out about alcohol-related dementia including symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and support. There are some lifestyle behaviours with enough evidence to show that changing them will reduce your risk of dementia. A lifelong approach to good health is the best way to lower your risk of dementia. They may also require medications to help manage symptoms and conditions due to excessive alcohol use.

Univariate analysis of depressive status in participants

Drinking more than 28 units per week can lead to a sharper decline in thinking skills as people get older. Over time, excessive alcohol consumption increases a person’s risk of AD by 300%. The review, published in Addiction, has shown that abstaining from alcohol completely can actually increase the risk of dementia. Furthermore, dementia risk did not differ between daily drinkers and occasional drinkers. The same is alcoholic dementia real was true in comparison between lifetime abstainers and current drinkers.

Increased risk for all-cause dementia in people who abstain from alcohol

\(\mathrm wi\)  is the weight of the ith component, which takes values in the range 0–1. \(q_i\) is the different quantiles, representing the changes in the respective drug addiction variables. A linear link is assumed for the OPE metabolite concentrations and cognitive function.

How we reviewed this article:

• Dementia is a globally increasing health issue and since no cure is currently available, prevention is crucial.
• Long-term alcohol use may lead to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a type of dementia that affects more than six million Americans.
• The relationship between daily drinking and dementia risk was also examined in four cohorts that included consistent information on frequency of alcohol use.
• Due to its long and widespread use, alcohol has also been studied extensively.
• A 2020 report from The Lancet Commission for Dementia Prevention, Intervention and Care estimated that 40% of global dementia cases could be prevented or delayed if 12 key modifiable risk factors for dementia were eliminated—with excessive or harmful alcohol use in midlife newly listed as one of those factors.

Adults who engage in at least 150 min of LPA per week, spread over 3 or more days, or at least 30 min per session, exhibit a lower risk of cognitive impairment compared to inactive individuals. Similarly, those who participate in MPA for a minimum of 150 min per week, spread over 3 days or more, also show a reduced incidence of cognitive impairment. Furthermore, individuals who engage in VPA for 150 min or more per week, across 3 or more days, exhibit a reduced incidence of cognitive impairment relative to their inactive counterparts. To gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between cognitive function and combined exposure to OPE metabolites, both weighted quantile sum (WQS) regression and Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR) models were used in this study.

Alcohol consumption and risk of dementia: 23 year follow-up of Whitehall II cohort study

A standard drink contains 14 grams, or 0.6 ounces (oz), of pure alcohol in the United States. Neuroscience News is an online science magazine offering free to read research articles about neuroscience, neurology, psychology, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, robotics, deep learning, neurosurgery, mental health and more. Despite this, there may be other characteristics such as social activity that could drive the apparent protective effect of alcohol against dementia, rather than alcohol use per se. In recent decades, the estimated global prevalence of dementia has nearly tripled, from 20.2 million in 1990 to 57.4 million in 2019. By 2050, the projection is that there will be 152 million people globally living with dementia. While a selection of studies is discussed below, Table 2 gives an overview of all published studies in compliance with our inclusion criteria.

• By 2050, the number of individuals living with dementia globally is projected to increase to 152 million 2.
• Regardless of type of alcohol consumed, the risk of dementia increased linearly, starting around 14 units/week (appendix figure S5).
• Imaging studies of ‘uncomplicated alcoholics’ – individuals with no history of nutritional deficiency, hepatic failure, or other indirect forms of brain injury – confirm structural abnormalities, including changes to the corpus callosum, pons, and cerebellum 12.
• The cross-sectional design of this study makes it challenging to establish the causal temporal phase between exposure factors and outcomes.

Adolescent Alcohol and the Spectrum of Cognitive Dysfunction in Aging

This study offers specific recommendations regarding the intensity, frequency, and duration of PA to mitigate the risk of cognitive decline in middle-aged and older adults. Meanwhile, our findings offer guidance to healthcare professionals and public health practitioners in developing prevention strategies about cognitive decline on the ground. A cross-sectional study was conducted using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2011–2014. Cognitive function was assessed using the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease (CERAD) word learning test, the CERAD word recall test, the Animal Fluency Test (AFT), and the Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST). Weighted multiple linear regression, weighted quantile sum (WQS) regression, and Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR) models were used to examine the effects of individual and mixed exposures to OPE metabolites on cognitive function. Cox regression was used in all analyses, with age as the timescale to model the associations with hazard of incident dementia.

Additional searches/sensitivity analysis

Interventions aimed at alleviating loneliness may benefit from incorporating strategies to improve sleep, which could help in reducing the development of depressive symptoms. Implementing interventions that both reduce loneliness and enhance sleep quality simultaneously may be more effective in preventing or alleviating depressive symptoms in this population. In this study, we found that after adjusting for socio-demographic, health status, and lifestyle factors, loneliness and poor sleep quality were independent risk factors for depressive symptoms among participants. Additionally, our findings reveal the mediating role of sleep quality between loneliness and depressive symptoms, offering new insights into the mechanisms by which loneliness may lead to depression. The determinants of cognitive impairment or function can be classified into non-modifiable and modifiable categories.

For example, some reports suggest that light-to-moderate alcohol use can reduce dementia risk as compared to those who have abstained from alcohol. In contrast, other studies report that alcohol use does not impact the risk of dementia. When compared with abstainers, the risk for dementia was lower in occasional, light–moderate and moderate–heavy drinkers (Table 3). Similar relationships were found in the fully adjusted model and competing risk model, as well as in the subsample of males. For women, the unadjusted model showed that, when compared with abstainers, the risk for dementia was lower in occasional, light–moderate and moderate–heavy drinkers.

Laboratory test of OPEs

• Beverage type was not consistently assessed across the cohorts and therefore could not be considered in the current study.
• Most OPEs are easily metabolized into dialkyl or diaryl groups and various hydroxylated products upon entering the body.
• Analyses first focused on the categorical alcohol use variable and were conducted in the full sample with current abstainers as the reference category.
• After a long period of neglect, research interest has increased in recent years and has been spurred on by clinical demand, increased reported rates of alcohol abuse in older people, and increasing alcohol consumption by women 2, 3.

Unlike patients with other dementia syndromes, patients with alcohol-induced dementia are unlikely to demonstrate language impairment, an observation incorporated into the ARD criteria proposed by Oslin and colleagues 21, 35; however, preserved confrontational naming has not been shown in all studies 44. However, the ARD groups had poorer performance on visuospatial measures, including clock drawing and copying tasks. Deficits on tasks of working memory 44, motor speed 34, and executive function (verbal abstract reasoning 44 and letter fluency 34) have also been observed in ARD samples in comparison with healthy controls. While findings are limited by small samples (which in some cases overlapped between studies) as well as differences in group characteristics (that is, global dementia severity), Munro and colleagues 57 proposed that the clinical profile of ARD reflects both cortical and subcortical pathology.