Even social drinking can affect the brain, and cause memory loss

Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been saying that no amount of alcohol is safe as it affects various organs of the body and is carcinogenic with repeated use, new research continuously proves why even limited alcohol use should no longer be considered.

- BY S VENKAT NARAYAN Our SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Based Medicine suggests that even light alcohol consumption can increase the risk of dementia, or memory loss.

Although excessive alcohol consumption had already been linked to dementia, the current finding — encompassing 550,000 adults aged between 56 and 72, as well as genetics information from 2.4 million study participants — shows that you may want to reconsider an occasional glass of wine or any other drink.

In fact, there are consequences of having even one drink a day, three drinks a week raising dementia risk by 15 per cent.

The largely observational research also shows that reducing or stopping alcohol consumption leads to a measurable reduction in dementia risk, but the percentage of risk reduction depends on the amount you were drinking before. Stopping or reducing alcohol sharply leads to a roughly 15% drop in dementia risk for each three-drink-perweek decrease.

Why is this study significant? "Previous studies have linked heavy drinking with increased dementia risk.

Moderate drinking findings have been more mixed. Now the genetic analyses suggested that even low alcohol intakes (or "social drinking") could potentially increase dementia risk (to a small degree)," Anya Topiwala, honorary consultant psychiatrist at the University of Oxford and lead researcher told The Indian Express.