New research has found that moderate drinking also damages the brain

study of hundreds of Londoners found that drinking eight to 12 glasses of wine a week was associated with atrophy of the sea mass.
photo source: Quinn Dombrowski Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A new study has found that drinking just a few beers a week can also cause lasting changes in the brain, although the functional significance of such changes is unclear.
is widely believed that drinking too much is bad for your health, but both traditional views and government dietary guidelines say that moderate drinking is available. The U.S. government favors one drink a day for women and two for men.
, however, a new study published recently in
found that drinking at this level (8 to 12 cups a week) was associated with a number of cognitive declines in brain scans.
recruited 550 Londoners to Oxford University for an MRI scan. These people are not simple Londoners, they are civil servants in government, and since 1985 they have been conducting a health habits survey every five years, including how much they drink. This allows researchers to explore the relationship between an individual's drinking habits and the results of brain scans.
researchers found that moderate drinkers over 30 years were associated with degeneration and atrophy of the sea mass (the brain region involved in memory and navigation), as well as degeneration of the whiteness of the brain.
actually, "the more a person drinks, the smaller his sea mass is." Anya Topiwala, lead author of the study and professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, said. Drinking more than once a week causes the sea mass to shrink by 0.01%. In contrast, the average adult experienced a 0.02% reduction in the age of each one-year-old sea horse.
study surveyed only a few hundred Londoners, most of them well-educated middle class, so the results may not represent a broad population. Topiwala also points out that there may be a "choice bias" in the sample, where people need to have MRI scans from London to Oxford and spend an hour on brain scans and other memory tests, which may not be the case for those with alcohol dependence or brain damage caused by alcohol consumption.
notable, the researchers also noted that the statistical changes in the body were only more pronounced in the right mass, while the change in the left mass was not. Mr Topiwala said it was not yet known why. (Source: Science Network Feng Weiwei)