Wine, a product of human civilization, has a long history of more than 5,000 years. Alcohol consumption is a major contributor to death and disability worldwide, and alcohol abuse can induce cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, metabolic diseases, and even some cancers. Often, people think that moderate alcohol consumption is good for health, but this is not the case.
Previously, a research team led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a research paper titled "Global burden of cancer in 2020 attributable to alcohol consumption: a population-based study" in the Lancet Oncology, a top journal in oncology.
Research emphasizes, don't drink a drop! More than 740,000 new cancers worldwide are related to alcohol consumption, and moderate amounts are not enough.
Studies have shown that 740,000 new cancer cases in 2020 may be linked to alcohol consumption. Alcohol-related cancers account for 77% of cases in men and 23% in women, with the most cases of esophageal, liver and breast cancer. Research calls on the public to raise awareness of the carcinogenesis of alcohol in order to reduce alcohol intake.
Recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published a research paper entitled "Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank" in the journal Nature Communications.
The study showed that even moderate alcohol consumption can make the brain smaller, and light to moderate drinking is associated with a decrease in overall brain volume.
In the study, researchers analysed the association between alcohol intake and brain structure in 36,678 healthy middle-aged and older adults in the UK biobank, using brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to calculate white and gray matter volumes in different areas of the brain.
To analyze a possible link between alcohol consumption and the brain, the researchers controlled for confounding variables that could confuse the relationship, including age, height, sex, smoking status, socioeconomic status, genetic ancestry and place of residence, and also corrected for brain volume data for overall head size.
The researchers collected the amount of alcohol consumed by all participants in a questionnaire format and divided the participants into groups ranging from dripping alcohol to 4 units of alcohol per day (1 unit of alcohol refers to 8 g of alcohol).
When grouping, the researchers observed a clear trend that as alcohol intake increased, the gray and white matter volume in the brain decreased, and the more you drank, the worse it became.
Alcohol consumption is related to changes in gray matter and white matter volume in the brain
To gain a deeper understanding of the effects of drinking alcohol on the brain, the researchers compared drinking-related brain shrinkage to aging-related brain shrinkage.
The analysis found that every unit of alcohol consumed daily reflected greater aging effects in the brain. Specifically, compared with dripping alcohol, 1 alcohol unit per day is equivalent to half a year of brain aging; 2 units of alcohol per day, the brain is 2 years old; 3 alcohol units per day, brain aging for 3.5 years; 4 alcohol units per day, brain aging for more than 10 years.
Different drinking amounts are specifically related to gray matter and white matter volume
Even if those who became alcoholics were removed from the analysis, the link remained. The researchers found that the shrinkage of the brain was not limited to any one region, but the entire brain became smaller.
All in all, this large-scale study revealed a close relationship between drinking and brain changes, providing further evidence that drinking causes brain shrinkage and quantifying the number of years of brain shrinkage caused by drinking. This is to warn people that there is no safe amount of drinking, and the safest amount of alcohol is 0.
Next, the researchers hope to know whether one bottle of beer a day is better than not drinking seven bottles a week at night. Although studies have not yet begun, the researchers speculate that drinking seven bottles at once is more harmful.
Paper Link:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5