A University of Oxford study has noted that there is no such thing as a “safe” level of drinking.
According to the study, the increased consumption of alcohol is associated with poorer brain health.
Senior clinical researcher at Oxford and lead author Anya Topiwala noted that drinking had an effect on the brain’s gray matter — regions in the brain that make up “important bits where information is processed.”
“The more people drank, the less the volume of their gray matter,” Topiwala said via email.
“Brain volume reduces with age and more severely with dementia. Smaller brain volume also predicts worse performance on memory testing,” she explained.
“Whilst alcohol only made a small contribution to this (0.8%), it was a greater contribution than other ‘modifiable’ risk factors,” she said, explaining that modifiable risk factors are “ones you can do something about, in contrast to ageing.”
