Study: Moderate lifetime drinking may lead to lower Alzheimer-related beta amyloid deposits in the brain

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Mod­er­ate drink­ing tied to low­er lev­els of Alzheimer’s brain pro­tein (Busi­ness Standard):

“Kore­an researchers stud­ied 414 men and women, aver­age age 71, who were free of demen­tia or alco­hol-relat­ed dis­or­ders. All under­went phys­i­cal exams, tests of men­tal acu­ity, and positron emis­sion tomog­ra­phy (PET) and mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (MRI) scans. They were care­ful­ly inter­viewed about their drink­ing habits.

The study, in PLOS Med­i­cine, mea­sured drink­ing in “stan­dard drinks” — 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine, or one-and-a-half ounces of hard liquor. Com­pared with abstain­ers, those who drank one to 13 stan­dard drinks a week had a 66 per cent low­er rate of beta amy­loid deposits in their brains.

The results applied only to those who drank mod­er­ate­ly for decades, and not to those who recent­ly began drink­ing mod­er­ate­ly or drank more than 13 drinks a week.”

The Study:

Asso­ci­a­tion of mod­er­ate alco­hol intake with in vivo amy­loid-beta depo­si­tion in human brain: A cross-sec­tion­al study (PLOS Med­i­cine). From the Abstract:

  • Back­ground: An emerg­ing body of lit­er­a­ture has indi­cat­ed that mod­er­ate alco­hol intake may be pro­tec­tive against Alzheimer dis­ease (AD) demen­tia. How­ev­er, lit­tle infor­ma­tion is avail­able regard­ing whether mod­er­ate alco­hol intake is relat­ed to reduc­tions in amy­loid-beta (AB) depo­si­tion, or is pro­tec­tive via amy­loid-inde­pen­dent mech­a­nisms in the liv­ing human brain. Here we exam­ined the asso­ci­a­tions of mod­er­ate alco­hol intake with in vivo AD patholo­gies, includ­ing cere­bral A? depo­si­tion, neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion of AD-sig­na­ture regions, and cere­bral white mat­ter hyper­in­ten­si­ties (WMHs) in the liv­ing human brain.
  • Con­clu­sions: In this study, we observed in mid­dle- and old-aged indi­vid­u­als with nei­ther demen­tia nor alco­hol-relat­ed dis­or­ders that mod­er­ate life­time alco­hol intake was asso­ci­at­ed with low­er cere­bral AB depo­si­tion com­pared to a life­time his­to­ry of not drink­ing. Mod­er­ate life­time alco­hol intake may have a ben­e­fi­cial influ­ence on AD by reduc­ing patho­log­i­cal amy­loid depo­si­tion rather than amy­loid-inde­pen­dent neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion or cere­brovas­cu­lar injury.

The Study in Context: