That Beer Might Shrink Your Brain!

By Anastacia Mott Austin

After years of studies touting the heart-healthy benefits of moderate drinking of alcoholic beverages, new research may give tipplers pause.

The authors of the new study, published in this month’s issue of Archives of Neurology, found that even moderate drinkers had smaller-sized brains than those of non-drinkers.

Carol Ann Paul, a neuroscience professor at Wellesley College, and her colleagues looked at the brains of 1,839 healthy people who had undergone magnetic image resonance (MRI) scans of their brains as part of the Framingham Offspring Study, a lifelong study of the heart health of its subjects. The subjects self-reported how much alcohol they consumed on a regular basis, and the scientists compared their brain volumes.

The study concluded that the more alcohol one regularly consumed, the smaller the brain’s volume was. Abstainers were defined as those who did not drink any alcohol at all, light drinkers consumed 1-7 drinks per week, moderate drinkers 8-14 per week, and heavy drinkers were defined as those who drank more than 14 drinks per week.

Paul and her co-authors began their study hoping to find that light to moderate levels of imbibing would have a protective effect on brain volume. Instead, they found the opposite. Said Paul to reporters, "In fact, any level of alcohol consumption resulted in a decline in brain volume."

Those who completely abstained from alcohol had higher brain volumes than any other group. Even light drinkers had brains that were slightly smaller than the teetotalers.

The study also noted that women’s brains were much more affected by alcohol consumption than men’s brains. More men in the study admitted to being heavy drinkers, but the differences in brain volume between the groups was more marked among women.

This is likely because women are generally smaller in size than men, and metabolize alcohol more quickly because of their higher percentage of relative body fat.

So what, you might slur, can in hand. Who wants to have a bigger brain if it means no drinking at all? You may have a point, say the researchers.

"We're talking very small differences here," said Dr. James Garbutt, a psychiatry professor at Chapel Hill University in North Carolina. "We're not seeing 10 to 20 percent shrinkage."

Indeed, there was only a 1.5 percent shrinkage in brain volume between abstainers and the heaviest drinkers.

Still, the results of the study are worth noting, especially since even the lightest of indulging clearly affects brain volume.

"We always knew that alcohol at higher dosages results in shrinking of the brain and cognitive deficit," says Dr. Petros Levounis, M.D., of New York’s Addiction Institute at at St. Luke's Hospital (who was not a co-author of the study). "What is new with this article is that it shows brain shrinking at lower doses of alcohol."