Who gets dementia first – the alcoholics or abstainers?

Dementia is defined as a chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.

People are living longer and because of this, the number of people living with dementia is expected to triple by 2050.

A new study published in The BMJ on August 1 found that people who abstain from alcohol, and thus do not consume any alcohol at all, or people who consume more than 14 units of alcohol per week (that’s about three and a half litres of beer) are at an increased risk for developing dementia.

The study consisted of 9 087 participants over more than 30 years. Out of these 9 087 participants, over the 30 year period 397 participants developed dementia. The average age between these 397 participants at the time they were diagnosed with dementia was 76. All 397 participants diagnosed with dementia belonged to either the study group that abstained from alcohol entirely for a large part of the 30 years during which the study was conducted, or to the study group that consumed 14 units or more of alcohol per week.

This is an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, and the researchers cannot rule out the possibility that some of the risk may be due to unmeasured (confounding) factors.

The authors of the study concluded the paper by stating that the study “should not motivate people who do not drink to start drinking given the known detrimental effects of alcohol consumption for mortality, neuropsychiatric disorders, cirrhosis of the liver, and cancer”

Sevil Yasar at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in a separate editorial, stated that “alcohol consumption of 1-14 units/week (moderate consumption) may benefit brain health; however, alcohol choices must take into account all associated risks, including liver disease and cancer.”