Originally published January 25 2005
A drink a day may prevent memory loss in old age, new study suggests
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A New England Journal of Medicine study says there's more evidence that drinking alcohol in small daily quantities can be good for you. The report says that older women who drank one alcoholic beverage per day were 20 percent less likely to develop memory loss problems such as dementia than those who abstained all together. The journal's accompanying editorial warned that this is a preliminary study whose results should be used with caution.
A drink a day may keep dementia away.
That's the conclusion of a new study that found that older women who had one alcoholic drink a day had a 20 percent reduced risk of cognitive impairment, compared to women who abstained.
"A decent proportion of women we see who are having more memory changes than other women will go on to get dementia," said senior study author Francine Grodstein, an associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
"If alcohol at moderate levels is helping to prevent some changes in memory today, that most likely will translate 10 years from now into them being less likely to develop dementia," she added.
"This is a step down the road, rather than something that leads to absolutely definite conclusions," said Evans, director of the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago.
While experts know that excessive alcohol intake on a regular basis can damage the brain, it has been unclear what the effects of moderate consumption might be.
Light drinking has been linked to several positive health results, including a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Given that cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment share risk factors, it makes sense that light drinking might also benefit memory and other aspects of cognitive functioning, Grodstein said.
Women who drank one-half to one glass of alcohol per day had better cognitive scores than teetotalers.
For one thing, the editorial pointed out, people who consume small amounts of alcohol seem to have better health than people who don't drink at all.
It's therefore possible that the changes in cognition could be attributable to something other than alcohol intake.
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