Even Moderate Alcohol Seems To Shrink Brain

Using 1,839 subjects in the Framingham Offspring Study examined with functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) researchers find that even lower levels of alcohol drinking are associated with more rapid brain shrinkage with age.

Increasing alcohol intake was associated with loss in total brain volume greater than expected from age alone (P<0.001), reported Carol Ann Paul, of Wellesley College, and colleagues in the October issue of the Archives of Neurology. In the cross-sectional study, women were affected more strongly than men by moderate alcohol intake averaging one to two drinks a day (eight to 14 per week).

Do you drink two drinks a day? If so, you are probably getting dumber faster than you need to.

The hope was that cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption would keep the brain better fed with blood and slow brain aging. But that hope seems unrealistic now.

The cardiovascular benefits of low to moderate alcohol intake are thought to result from increasing blood flow rates, which would have been expected to benefit the brain also, Paul said. But rather than preventing normal age-related volume reductions, the effects of moderate drinking were closer to those of heavy drinking, which has been linked to brain atrophy and cognitive decline, the researchers noted.

Your brain is shrinking anyway but alcohol makes it worse.

"Decline in brain volume -- estimated at 2 percent per decade -- is a natural part of aging," says Carol Ann Paul, who conducted the study when she was at the Boston University School of Public Health. She had hoped to find that alcohol might protect against such brain shrinkage. "However, we did not find the protective effect," says Paul, who is now an instructor in the neuroscience program at Wellesley College. "In fact, any level of alcohol consumption resulted in a decline in brain volume."

Brain rejuvenation is going to be the hardest challenge in rejuvenation. Don't make it any worse by shrinking your brain any faster than unavoidable.

On the bright side, all the hours I spend every day searching for content for blog posts might be stimulating and exercising my brain. Web searching seems to stimulate the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of your brain. So is all that web surfing really just a prudent anti-aging therapy? Does brain exercise slow brain aging?