11 ms·

Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes

148 points by Bhilai 4y ago

novalis78 4y ago
I decided as a 14 year old to never drink. It’s been an interesting experiment in particular regarding peer pressure, group dynamics and societal norms.
- epolanski 4y ago
  interesting === awful? that's how it looks to me when non-drinkers have to explain every time themselves
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - grecy 4y ago
    If you really don’t want to explain, fill a beer bottle with water and drink that all night. I frequently have one or two beers then do this for the rest of a party, and feel great the next day.
    - brightball 4y ago
      I learned to just carry around a half-empty bottle if I was at a party. As long as you had something in your hand, it wasn't a topic.
      - grecy 4y ago
        My personal problem is that I can't help drinking that bottle in the lapses between conversation or whatever. So filling it with water is perfect for me.
        rendall 4y ago
        Same. Drinking whatever is in my hands is almost a tic. Filling it with water is an excellent idea!
  - casion 4y ago
    I've rarely had to say more than "no thank you". It's never been awful.
  - novalis78 4y ago
    Don’t mind that at all. It’s fascinating to see how people react to one’s explanation. Very polite people will actually ask if I am okay if they drink around me which of course is no issue whatsoever.
- emit_time 4y ago
  What’s your experience been? I also have never drunken, and really don’t plan on it. My mistake was avoiding parties and socialization in college along with drinking.
  - novalis78 4y ago
    Well, I think it helped me strengthen my will power, that’s for sure. Also watching people around you get drunk a couple of times early on was quite the turn off. It’s actually rather sad. Often I am considered to ‘have excellent memory’ compared to my peers (I am 44 now). There was no religious motivation to start and even though I was Buddhist for a few years I consider myself Atheist now. It was just an early aversion towards the taste and then a heightened sense of peer pressure that didn’t sit well with me. After that it became a game of ‘let’s see how long I can keep it up’. Now it’s second nature - but I do notice there is a deep seated aversion towards alcohol and probably a side effect of conditioning myself against it. That probably goes with all drugs (I don’t take any) And finally yes, society is very hostile towards sobriety. Less so in the US. People always feel embarrassed and defensive, interestingly enough. It also turns out to be a great example to people who struggle with alcohol and children, so I am rather happy having stayed away from the rat poison ;-)
    - wanderlust123 4y ago
      Exactly why I didn’t drink. The more my peers tried to pressure me into it, the less I wanted to try it. It was like refusing to join some weird cult.
- freetime2 4y ago
  On the plus side, per-capita alcohol consumption does seem to be on the decline in many countries over the past few decades [1]. So hopefully in the future it will be less difficult for others to make a similar choice. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890?time=1980..2014 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890?t...
- mkaic 4y ago
  Same here, though I grew up as a Mormon so it wasn't as much my own personal choice as it was a religious conviction. I'm an atheist now, so it is a personal choice now. I find it can be really enjoyable to be "the sober friend" at group outings—being the only one with my wits about me while my friends get super relaxed, outgoing, and nonsensical all of a sudden is pretty funny. I don't think there's anything evil about drinking, I've just gotten this far in my life without it and figure "heck, might as well go for broke" at this point. I do believe that alcohol advertisements on TV and radio should be banned like tobacco ads were, though. The fact that I have been conditioned by ads since I was a kid to think that beer is delicious and harmless is unnerving to me. Ideally, drinking ought to be a personal choice to exchange risk for pleasure. This only holds true when drinking is done responsibly, though. Irresponsible drinking can ruin lives, relationships, and hurt or kill people. Budweiser and Heineken may be required to say "drink responsibly" at the end of all their ads, but it's extremely obvious they don't actually care. At the end of the day, they make more money off alcoholics than responsible drinkers, so they and their marketing cannot be trusted. The incentives are too misaligned.
LatteLazy 4y ago
More worthless associations...
elecush 4y ago
Alcohol clearly lowers brain matter volumes I don't understand how any of you scientifically educated chaps can look at the figures and determine otherwise. It says literally "negative in every dimension" and that is not an exaggeration. Now, if you think alcohol is the only and best substance escape available, then maybe there is an internal rage against the sentiment. But alcohol is very low-tech and I encourage you all to explore the alternatives.
metadat 4y ago
Hmm.. maybe better to avoid alcohol completely, or stick to other less harmful recreational drugs and pastimes?
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Figure 3 seems to suggest that as long as you average < 1 drink/day, you're doing (very very slightly) better than somebody who averages 0.
  - gruez 4y ago
    The standard response to that is 0 drinks per day includes abstainers who might be former alcoholics and therefore might be dragging the average down. Some of the data tables have a separate category for "excluding abstainers", but there's no line graph that has abstainers excluded.
    - theGnuMe 4y ago
      I would imagine they controlled for that or it’s insignificant.
      - aplusbi 4y ago
        Doesn't sound like they controlled for it or even considered it. While they did have a control group that excluded non-drinkers and heavy drinkers, that was solely to control for bias at the extreme ends, and not to control for sober alcoholics or health problems that preclude drinking. > Our analyses comprise models that include two different sets of control variables. The standard set includes standardized age, standardized age squared standardized height, handedness (right/left/ambidextrous; dummy-coded), sex (female:0, male:1), current smoker status, former light smoker, former heavy smoker, and standardized Townsend index of social deprivation measured at the zip code level62. To control for genetic population structure, the models also include the first 40 genetic principal components63 and county of residence (dummy-coded)62. A second set of extended control variables includes all standard control variables and in addition standardized BMI, standardized educational attainment64, and standardized weight. To determine whether observations at the extreme ends of the drinking distribution bias the estimates of the relationship between alcohol intake and IDPs, we also estimate a model that excludes abstainers and a model that excludes heavy drinkers (i.e., women who reported consuming more than 18 units/week and men who consumed more than 24 units/week), both with standard controls. Here they talk about the different groupings: > we bin participants in the following six categories based on average alcohol intake: (1) abstainers, (2) individuals who drank less than one unit/day, (3) individuals who drank between one (included) and two (excluded) units/day (recommended maximal alcohol consumption based on the UK Chief Medical Officers “low-risk” guidelines32), (4) individuals who drank between two (included) and three (excluded) units/day, (5) individuals who drank between three (included) and four (excluded) units/day, and (6) individuals who drank at least four units/day. Again no mention of sober alcoholics or health problems. This study: https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/large-study-challenges-the-theory-that-light-alcohol-consumption-benefits-heart-health https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/large-study-c... found that while moderate drinkers had better cardiovascular health than non-drinkers, this was due to other lifestyle factors associated with moderate drinking, not the drinking itself.
vkou 4y ago
> Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two DAUs (daily alcohol units), and become stronger as alcohol intake increases. It should be noted that a single 'weak' 5% beer is 1.65 DAUs.
- metadat 4y ago
  Does this mean no more megapints? Seriously though, why doesn't the unit of 1 DAU correspond with any existing commercial form factors? A single 12oz 5% beer would be a more helpful starting point.
  - triyambakam 4y ago
    In the UK it's common to see bottles labeled with how many units it is... maybe that's not the case where you are?
    - p1necone 4y ago
      This helps, but it's still unintuitive that the "standard unit drink" is not the same as the actual standard drink that most people consume. 330ml @ 4.5-5% abv (a fairly typical mass market beer) would make way more sense to me. A lot of people are going to assume that 1 standard drink === 1 glass of wine/beer. They're not going to read the fine print on government messaging.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    IIRC it's supposed to represent 10ml of pure ethanol or (coincidentall?) approximately how much an average healthy liver can process in an hour.
trh0awayman 4y ago
Logical positivist vs Knight of faith, Berserker approach to life
Mathnerd314 4y ago
The overall conclusion of the study is "We observe negative relationships between alcohol intake and global gray and white matter measures". But if you look at Figure 3, it is consistent with a J-shaped risk curve with risk equal to nondrinkers around 16 grams ethanol per day, like the 16.9 number found for 40-64 year old males in https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext#seccestitle140 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6.... So I would say this study adds another reason to not overdrink, and confirms that current drinking expectations are too high, but isn't a reason to abstain entirely.
- boberoni 4y ago
  For reference, a single shot (1.5 fl oz of 40% alcohol) has 14g of alcohol.
  - Mathnerd314 4y ago
    Yeah. And it's a daily average, so you can have 3 standard drinks every Saturday for example (aiming for the TMREL of 6g). I'm not sure about the maximum per day; there was a heart disease study that defined heavy drinking as 60g in a day,but I haven't seen any studies specifically on drinking patterns at this low intake.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    Ergo, 7 shots once a week and I'm good to go!
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    A pint of beer is 20g. I used to drink socially when I was young, and I usually had more than that.
    - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
      Of what abv%? 4.1% light or 8% dipa.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jeffxtreme 4y ago
As in general with associative studies, it is hard to make a distinct conclusion on causation. Do we know if alcohol decreases gray and white matter volumes? Could the causation run in the reverse direction? Bi-directionally? Or could there be some common cause (e.g., proneness to "risky" behavior) that leads to both? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation#Examples_of_illogically_inferring_causation_from_correlation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  Indeed, we'd need an interventional study. Forcing a random study group to drink for decades seems unethical and expensive, but I wish we had the results.
- ryandvm 4y ago
  Every study that comes through here somebody invariably trots out the old "correlation does not equal causation" argument. You're not wrong, but you know, sometimes it is causation. Rather than disregard every study, I just sort of internally give it a 50% weight and move on. Maybe it's bogus, maybe it's not, but surely some of them are correctly identifying causation. Life is too short to quibble about this crap.
  - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
    "Life is too short to quibble about this crap. " Yup, so have a drink when you want, or don't. We will all die eventually.
    - Mathnerd314 4y ago
      ... Or will we? Anti-aging research is an area.
      - DefineOutside 4y ago
        even with every disease cured and without aging, you still will die by some random event unless you hide away in a bunker - in which case the bunker will eventually collapse and you will still die
nlfire 4y ago
I gave up alcohol years ago after reading a few of these studies. I wasn't drinking often anyways, but does it ever feel good to never feel that morning after headache. I found even one pint in the evening could disrupt my sleep. Saving on the restaurant, and eliminating the liquor store, bills was gravy.
- senectus1 4y ago
  same here. Company xmas party is coming up, I'll have a couple to drink there because its free but I'll be super lightweight so only a couple will do anyway.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  I poured a 3/4 full bottle of scotch that I'd been gifted down the drain the other day. If there's booze in the house I'll have a drink several nights a week; I now routinely get a headache the next day with "just" two glasses of scotch, so it really isn't worth the damage it's doing to my body. My current plan is to have a beer or two when I'm out, but to completely cut out drinking at home.
  - nlfire 4y ago
    Hm, I still have a fancy bottle of scotch I got as a gift, buried somewhere forgotten in the cupboards. That is it though. I brought the rest of my liquor cabinet to the office. The free booze was appreciated by the takers, although I admit I had mixed feelings about giving away what I deemed poison :). It was probably $600-700 worth.
gnicholas 4y ago
> Notably, the negative associations we observe with global IDPs are detectable in individuals who consume between 1 and 2 alcohol units daily. Thus, in the UK, consuming just one alcoholic drink daily (or two units of alcohol) could be associated with changes in GMV and WMV in the brain. Did anyone find anything on lower levels of consumption? I've had a hard time finding evidence related to any potential harm from having 2 drinks/mo, for example. I could imagine this would be very different than 30 drinks/mo.
ja3k 4y ago
About a year ago I started drinking a glass of wine every night because of a self experiment I did suggesting it was good for my sleep (https://ja3k.com/blog/wine https://ja3k.com/blog/wine). The title concerned me but if you look at the graphs there's basically no difference between 0 and 1 for either gray or white matter.
- aulin 4y ago
  Did it improve your sleep? I always found I fall asleep easily if I've been drinking in the evening but I invariably wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety or bad dreams
  - ja3k 4y ago
    In my data my REM and deep sleep percentages both improved while my total time asleep went down (in my mind a win-win). Subjectively my sleep velocity also improved. I don't have data for what happens when I have 2+ drinks but that definitely has a deleterious effect on my sleep. Especially after 3.
photochemsyn 4y ago
This seems to have been known for decades with respect to heavy users, now it's being found it lighter users. For background: > "Partial recovery of brain function with abstinence suggests that a proportion of the deÆcits must be neurochemical in origin while neuronal loss from selected brain regions indicates permanent and irreversible damage. The factors influencing these two components are unknown..." Kril, J. J., & Halliday, G. M. (1999). Brain shrinkage in alcoholics: a decade on and what have we learned? Progress in Neurobiology, 58(4), 381–387. https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00091-4 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00091-4 Here's something on mechanisms from 2021: > "Various mechanisms underlie ethanol-induced cell death, with oxidative stress and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress being the main pro-apoptotic mechanisms in alcohol abuse and FASD. Oxidative and ER stresses are induced by thiamine deficiency, especially in alcohol abuse, and are exacerbated by neuroinflammation, particularly in fetal ethanol exposure." https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8678 https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8678 Yes, psychedelics and cannabis are safer recreational drugs than alcohol is, and maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse. Revising drug laws to account for such realities is long overdue - although banning marketing and promoting public health campaigns on risks and side effects are also good ideas.
- p1necone 4y ago
  > maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse The negative health effects from moderate use of these are really not that bad, but it's very hard to moderately use them, they're a bit moreish. Although alcohol is pretty moreish too, and the withdrawals can be really bad. (Your body develops a chemical dependence to the point that stopping cold turkey can actually kill you)
elwebmaster 4y ago
Why are they performing this study in the UK instead of comparing the (self-reported) drinking population from the UK against a known, never to have consumed population, from a Muslim country? That would control for previous drinkers and underreporting the habit.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Couldn't there be countless other differences due to environment, food, culture, genetics, etc that would be hard to separate? I'm no scientist but I was under the impression that the control group should be as close as possible a cohort other than what is being tested.
- Chris2048 4y ago
  > against a known, never to have consumed population, from a Muslim country? Or, a population with a greater incentive to lie about past consumption?..
thereisnospork 4y ago
Does anyone know the same-person variance in gray and white matter volume, and if it has any measurable dependence on other biological factors (hydration and/or electrolyte balance come to mind as plausible)? And if any temporary[0] same-person effects are directly attributable to alcohol and its short term effects, e.g. hangover?[1] [0]I presume if permanent single-person shrinkage was observed it would have been a big enough headline to have been noticed. [1]Unless accounted for in sampling, drinkers would be statistically more likely to be experiencing transiently smaller brains from alcohol consumption or accompanying dehydration - if an effect exists.
elecush 4y ago
alcohol bad, yo.
sublinear 4y ago
Personally I'm far more more interested in questions about how correlated brain matter volumes are with real world outcomes and overall quality of life. I'm vaguely familiar with the term "synaptic plasticity" to roughly mean the way the brain processes information and how it changes over time with varying life experiences. It seems to me that one's risk-taking behavior may reduce brain matter volume, yet still improve quality of life because experience itself (literally the way the brain is wired) is worth far more. Some experiences are practically impossible without alcohol due to its social and cultural significance. To make a dumb metaphor, consider the fact that the raw number of pixels contained in an image isn't necessarily correlated with its success. What is a life, but a meme? Disclosure: I'm buzzed right now btw :p
- misja111 4y ago
  The article mentions that the effects are particularly strong in the frontal lobe. This is the part of your brain that's involved with planning and self-control, amongst others. So if chronic drinking damages that part of your brain most, the visible long term effects would be problems with planning and being less able to control your impulses and emotions. I have to say that this matches my (few) experiences with chronic drinkers quite well. I've seen them become less inhibited and less self-aware and become more selfish over a couple of decades, even when they're sober.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    My own experience with the so called "high functioning alcoholics" is they probably managed to both find the right level of moderation to slow this loss to a rate that they can handle and developed the coping strategy of keeping routines they cannot break. It's like they become robots. While it's definitely bad for health, I'm not sure broader society really cares because good health isn't necessarily correlated with success in life past a certain point. My somewhat more positive counterexamples roughly fall into the dichotomy of introverts and extroverts (yeah yeah I know). On the introvert side, I've seen hard drinking make people into creatures of habit. Not necessarily "bad" habits, but habits nonetheless such as overworking themselves in a narrow field, deep hobbies, etc. "drunken masters" so to speak. On the extrovert side, I've seen hard drinking train people to optimize for high charisma, handling crowds, and deep knowledge of conflict resolution to the detriment of being able to learn any other skills or really appreciate the world in any other way. The "life of the party" while being just as dead inside as the introverted example above. They get trapped into a certain way of life from the brain damage. I'm definitely not advocating alcohol abuse just sharing my perspective. I'm pretty sure more people drink than abstain so this isn't a topic that can be dismissed as just purely bad. If anyone knows of research on this kind of topic that would be amazing. Too often this is only discussed via movies, ads, and personal stories which are all strongly biased.
sdze 4y ago
Is there something similar studied for cannabis?
rbanffy 4y ago
They may have gotten it backwards - more gray and white matter volumes could make the person more aware of the hopelessness of life in general and, therefore, induce alcohol consumption. ;-)

148 points by Bhilai 4y ago

I decided as a 14 year old to never drink. It’s been an interesting experiment in particular regarding peer pressure, group dynamics and societal norms.

epolanski 4y ago
interesting === awful? that's how it looks to me when non-drinkers have to explain every time themselves
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- grecy 4y ago
  If you really don’t want to explain, fill a beer bottle with water and drink that all night. I frequently have one or two beers then do this for the rest of a party, and feel great the next day.
  - brightball 4y ago
    I learned to just carry around a half-empty bottle if I was at a party. As long as you had something in your hand, it wasn't a topic.
    - grecy 4y ago
      My personal problem is that I can't help drinking that bottle in the lapses between conversation or whatever. So filling it with water is perfect for me.
      - rendall 4y ago
        Same. Drinking whatever is in my hands is almost a tic. Filling it with water is an excellent idea!
- casion 4y ago
  I've rarely had to say more than "no thank you". It's never been awful.
- novalis78 4y ago
  Don’t mind that at all. It’s fascinating to see how people react to one’s explanation. Very polite people will actually ask if I am okay if they drink around me which of course is no issue whatsoever.
emit_time 4y ago
What’s your experience been? I also have never drunken, and really don’t plan on it. My mistake was avoiding parties and socialization in college along with drinking.
- novalis78 4y ago
  Well, I think it helped me strengthen my will power, that’s for sure. Also watching people around you get drunk a couple of times early on was quite the turn off. It’s actually rather sad. Often I am considered to ‘have excellent memory’ compared to my peers (I am 44 now). There was no religious motivation to start and even though I was Buddhist for a few years I consider myself Atheist now. It was just an early aversion towards the taste and then a heightened sense of peer pressure that didn’t sit well with me. After that it became a game of ‘let’s see how long I can keep it up’. Now it’s second nature - but I do notice there is a deep seated aversion towards alcohol and probably a side effect of conditioning myself against it. That probably goes with all drugs (I don’t take any) And finally yes, society is very hostile towards sobriety. Less so in the US. People always feel embarrassed and defensive, interestingly enough. It also turns out to be a great example to people who struggle with alcohol and children, so I am rather happy having stayed away from the rat poison ;-)
  - wanderlust123 4y ago
    Exactly why I didn’t drink. The more my peers tried to pressure me into it, the less I wanted to try it. It was like refusing to join some weird cult.
freetime2 4y ago
On the plus side, per-capita alcohol consumption does seem to be on the decline in many countries over the past few decades [1]. So hopefully in the future it will be less difficult for others to make a similar choice. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890?time=1980..2014 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890?t...
mkaic 4y ago
Same here, though I grew up as a Mormon so it wasn't as much my own personal choice as it was a religious conviction. I'm an atheist now, so it is a personal choice now. I find it can be really enjoyable to be "the sober friend" at group outings—being the only one with my wits about me while my friends get super relaxed, outgoing, and nonsensical all of a sudden is pretty funny. I don't think there's anything evil about drinking, I've just gotten this far in my life without it and figure "heck, might as well go for broke" at this point. I do believe that alcohol advertisements on TV and radio should be banned like tobacco ads were, though. The fact that I have been conditioned by ads since I was a kid to think that beer is delicious and harmless is unnerving to me. Ideally, drinking ought to be a personal choice to exchange risk for pleasure. This only holds true when drinking is done responsibly, though. Irresponsible drinking can ruin lives, relationships, and hurt or kill people. Budweiser and Heineken may be required to say "drink responsibly" at the end of all their ads, but it's extremely obvious they don't actually care. At the end of the day, they make more money off alcoholics than responsible drinkers, so they and their marketing cannot be trusted. The incentives are too misaligned.

LatteLazy 4y ago

More worthless associations...

elecush 4y ago

Alcohol clearly lowers brain matter volumes I don't understand how any of you scientifically educated chaps can look at the figures and determine otherwise. It says literally "negative in every dimension" and that is not an exaggeration. Now, if you think alcohol is the only and best substance escape available, then maybe there is an internal rage against the sentiment. But alcohol is very low-tech and I encourage you all to explore the alternatives.

metadat 4y ago

Hmm.. maybe better to avoid alcohol completely, or stick to other less harmful recreational drugs and pastimes?

commandlinefan 4y ago
Figure 3 seems to suggest that as long as you average < 1 drink/day, you're doing (very very slightly) better than somebody who averages 0.
- gruez 4y ago
  The standard response to that is 0 drinks per day includes abstainers who might be former alcoholics and therefore might be dragging the average down. Some of the data tables have a separate category for "excluding abstainers", but there's no line graph that has abstainers excluded.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    I would imagine they controlled for that or it’s insignificant.
    - aplusbi 4y ago
      Doesn't sound like they controlled for it or even considered it. While they did have a control group that excluded non-drinkers and heavy drinkers, that was solely to control for bias at the extreme ends, and not to control for sober alcoholics or health problems that preclude drinking. > Our analyses comprise models that include two different sets of control variables. The standard set includes standardized age, standardized age squared standardized height, handedness (right/left/ambidextrous; dummy-coded), sex (female:0, male:1), current smoker status, former light smoker, former heavy smoker, and standardized Townsend index of social deprivation measured at the zip code level62. To control for genetic population structure, the models also include the first 40 genetic principal components63 and county of residence (dummy-coded)62. A second set of extended control variables includes all standard control variables and in addition standardized BMI, standardized educational attainment64, and standardized weight. To determine whether observations at the extreme ends of the drinking distribution bias the estimates of the relationship between alcohol intake and IDPs, we also estimate a model that excludes abstainers and a model that excludes heavy drinkers (i.e., women who reported consuming more than 18 units/week and men who consumed more than 24 units/week), both with standard controls. Here they talk about the different groupings: > we bin participants in the following six categories based on average alcohol intake: (1) abstainers, (2) individuals who drank less than one unit/day, (3) individuals who drank between one (included) and two (excluded) units/day (recommended maximal alcohol consumption based on the UK Chief Medical Officers “low-risk” guidelines32), (4) individuals who drank between two (included) and three (excluded) units/day, (5) individuals who drank between three (included) and four (excluded) units/day, and (6) individuals who drank at least four units/day. Again no mention of sober alcoholics or health problems. This study: https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/large-study-challenges-the-theory-that-light-alcohol-consumption-benefits-heart-health https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/large-study-c... found that while moderate drinkers had better cardiovascular health than non-drinkers, this was due to other lifestyle factors associated with moderate drinking, not the drinking itself.

vkou 4y ago

> Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two DAUs (daily alcohol units), and become stronger as alcohol intake increases. It should be noted that a single 'weak' 5% beer is 1.65 DAUs.

metadat 4y ago
Does this mean no more megapints? Seriously though, why doesn't the unit of 1 DAU correspond with any existing commercial form factors? A single 12oz 5% beer would be a more helpful starting point.
- triyambakam 4y ago
  In the UK it's common to see bottles labeled with how many units it is... maybe that's not the case where you are?
  - p1necone 4y ago
    This helps, but it's still unintuitive that the "standard unit drink" is not the same as the actual standard drink that most people consume. 330ml @ 4.5-5% abv (a fairly typical mass market beer) would make way more sense to me. A lot of people are going to assume that 1 standard drink === 1 glass of wine/beer. They're not going to read the fine print on government messaging.
- Tade0 4y ago
  IIRC it's supposed to represent 10ml of pure ethanol or (coincidentall?) approximately how much an average healthy liver can process in an hour.

trh0awayman 4y ago

Logical positivist vs Knight of faith, Berserker approach to life

Mathnerd314 4y ago

The overall conclusion of the study is "We observe negative relationships between alcohol intake and global gray and white matter measures". But if you look at Figure 3, it is consistent with a J-shaped risk curve with risk equal to nondrinkers around 16 grams ethanol per day, like the 16.9 number found for 40-64 year old males in https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext#seccestitle140 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6.... So I would say this study adds another reason to not overdrink, and confirms that current drinking expectations are too high, but isn't a reason to abstain entirely.

boberoni 4y ago
For reference, a single shot (1.5 fl oz of 40% alcohol) has 14g of alcohol.
- Mathnerd314 4y ago
  Yeah. And it's a daily average, so you can have 3 standard drinks every Saturday for example (aiming for the TMREL of 6g). I'm not sure about the maximum per day; there was a heart disease study that defined heavy drinking as 60g in a day,but I haven't seen any studies specifically on drinking patterns at this low intake.
- insanitybit 4y ago
  Ergo, 7 shots once a week and I'm good to go!
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  A pint of beer is 20g. I used to drink socially when I was young, and I usually had more than that.
  - TrueSlacker0 4y ago
    Of what abv%? 4.1% light or 8% dipa.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jeffxtreme 4y ago

As in general with associative studies, it is hard to make a distinct conclusion on causation. Do we know if alcohol decreases gray and white matter volumes? Could the causation run in the reverse direction? Bi-directionally? Or could there be some common cause (e.g., proneness to "risky" behavior) that leads to both? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation#Examples_of_illogically_inferring_causation_from_correlation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

arnaudsm 4y ago
Indeed, we'd need an interventional study. Forcing a random study group to drink for decades seems unethical and expensive, but I wish we had the results.
ryandvm 4y ago
Every study that comes through here somebody invariably trots out the old "correlation does not equal causation" argument. You're not wrong, but you know, sometimes it is causation. Rather than disregard every study, I just sort of internally give it a 50% weight and move on. Maybe it's bogus, maybe it's not, but surely some of them are correctly identifying causation. Life is too short to quibble about this crap.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  "Life is too short to quibble about this crap. " Yup, so have a drink when you want, or don't. We will all die eventually.
  - Mathnerd314 4y ago
    ... Or will we? Anti-aging research is an area.
    - DefineOutside 4y ago
      even with every disease cured and without aging, you still will die by some random event unless you hide away in a bunker - in which case the bunker will eventually collapse and you will still die

nlfire 4y ago

I gave up alcohol years ago after reading a few of these studies. I wasn't drinking often anyways, but does it ever feel good to never feel that morning after headache. I found even one pint in the evening could disrupt my sleep. Saving on the restaurant, and eliminating the liquor store, bills was gravy.

senectus1 4y ago
same here. Company xmas party is coming up, I'll have a couple to drink there because its free but I'll be super lightweight so only a couple will do anyway.
smallerfish 4y ago
I poured a 3/4 full bottle of scotch that I'd been gifted down the drain the other day. If there's booze in the house I'll have a drink several nights a week; I now routinely get a headache the next day with "just" two glasses of scotch, so it really isn't worth the damage it's doing to my body. My current plan is to have a beer or two when I'm out, but to completely cut out drinking at home.
- nlfire 4y ago
  Hm, I still have a fancy bottle of scotch I got as a gift, buried somewhere forgotten in the cupboards. That is it though. I brought the rest of my liquor cabinet to the office. The free booze was appreciated by the takers, although I admit I had mixed feelings about giving away what I deemed poison :). It was probably $600-700 worth.

gnicholas 4y ago

> Notably, the negative associations we observe with global IDPs are detectable in individuals who consume between 1 and 2 alcohol units daily. Thus, in the UK, consuming just one alcoholic drink daily (or two units of alcohol) could be associated with changes in GMV and WMV in the brain. Did anyone find anything on lower levels of consumption? I've had a hard time finding evidence related to any potential harm from having 2 drinks/mo, for example. I could imagine this would be very different than 30 drinks/mo.

ja3k 4y ago

About a year ago I started drinking a glass of wine every night because of a self experiment I did suggesting it was good for my sleep (https://ja3k.com/blog/wine https://ja3k.com/blog/wine). The title concerned me but if you look at the graphs there's basically no difference between 0 and 1 for either gray or white matter.

aulin 4y ago
Did it improve your sleep? I always found I fall asleep easily if I've been drinking in the evening but I invariably wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety or bad dreams
- ja3k 4y ago
  In my data my REM and deep sleep percentages both improved while my total time asleep went down (in my mind a win-win). Subjectively my sleep velocity also improved. I don't have data for what happens when I have 2+ drinks but that definitely has a deleterious effect on my sleep. Especially after 3.

photochemsyn 4y ago

This seems to have been known for decades with respect to heavy users, now it's being found it lighter users. For background: > "Partial recovery of brain function with abstinence suggests that a proportion of the deÆcits must be neurochemical in origin while neuronal loss from selected brain regions indicates permanent and irreversible damage. The factors influencing these two components are unknown..." Kril, J. J., & Halliday, G. M. (1999). Brain shrinkage in alcoholics: a decade on and what have we learned? Progress in Neurobiology, 58(4), 381–387. https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00091-4 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00091-4 Here's something on mechanisms from 2021: > "Various mechanisms underlie ethanol-induced cell death, with oxidative stress and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress being the main pro-apoptotic mechanisms in alcohol abuse and FASD. Oxidative and ER stresses are induced by thiamine deficiency, especially in alcohol abuse, and are exacerbated by neuroinflammation, particularly in fetal ethanol exposure." https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8678 https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8678 Yes, psychedelics and cannabis are safer recreational drugs than alcohol is, and maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse. Revising drug laws to account for such realities is long overdue - although banning marketing and promoting public health campaigns on risks and side effects are also good ideas.

p1necone 4y ago
> maybe opiates and cocaine are not really any worse The negative health effects from moderate use of these are really not that bad, but it's very hard to moderately use them, they're a bit moreish. Although alcohol is pretty moreish too, and the withdrawals can be really bad. (Your body develops a chemical dependence to the point that stopping cold turkey can actually kill you)

elwebmaster 4y ago

Why are they performing this study in the UK instead of comparing the (self-reported) drinking population from the UK against a known, never to have consumed population, from a Muslim country? That would control for previous drinkers and underreporting the habit.

colordrops 4y ago
Couldn't there be countless other differences due to environment, food, culture, genetics, etc that would be hard to separate? I'm no scientist but I was under the impression that the control group should be as close as possible a cohort other than what is being tested.
Chris2048 4y ago
> against a known, never to have consumed population, from a Muslim country? Or, a population with a greater incentive to lie about past consumption?..

thereisnospork 4y ago

Does anyone know the same-person variance in gray and white matter volume, and if it has any measurable dependence on other biological factors (hydration and/or electrolyte balance come to mind as plausible)? And if any temporary[0] same-person effects are directly attributable to alcohol and its short term effects, e.g. hangover?[1] [0]I presume if permanent single-person shrinkage was observed it would have been a big enough headline to have been noticed. [1]Unless accounted for in sampling, drinkers would be statistically more likely to be experiencing transiently smaller brains from alcohol consumption or accompanying dehydration - if an effect exists.

elecush 4y ago

alcohol bad, yo.

sublinear 4y ago

Personally I'm far more more interested in questions about how correlated brain matter volumes are with real world outcomes and overall quality of life. I'm vaguely familiar with the term "synaptic plasticity" to roughly mean the way the brain processes information and how it changes over time with varying life experiences. It seems to me that one's risk-taking behavior may reduce brain matter volume, yet still improve quality of life because experience itself (literally the way the brain is wired) is worth far more. Some experiences are practically impossible without alcohol due to its social and cultural significance. To make a dumb metaphor, consider the fact that the raw number of pixels contained in an image isn't necessarily correlated with its success. What is a life, but a meme? Disclosure: I'm buzzed right now btw :p

misja111 4y ago
The article mentions that the effects are particularly strong in the frontal lobe. This is the part of your brain that's involved with planning and self-control, amongst others. So if chronic drinking damages that part of your brain most, the visible long term effects would be problems with planning and being less able to control your impulses and emotions. I have to say that this matches my (few) experiences with chronic drinkers quite well. I've seen them become less inhibited and less self-aware and become more selfish over a couple of decades, even when they're sober.
- sublinear 4y ago
  My own experience with the so called "high functioning alcoholics" is they probably managed to both find the right level of moderation to slow this loss to a rate that they can handle and developed the coping strategy of keeping routines they cannot break. It's like they become robots. While it's definitely bad for health, I'm not sure broader society really cares because good health isn't necessarily correlated with success in life past a certain point. My somewhat more positive counterexamples roughly fall into the dichotomy of introverts and extroverts (yeah yeah I know). On the introvert side, I've seen hard drinking make people into creatures of habit. Not necessarily "bad" habits, but habits nonetheless such as overworking themselves in a narrow field, deep hobbies, etc. "drunken masters" so to speak. On the extrovert side, I've seen hard drinking train people to optimize for high charisma, handling crowds, and deep knowledge of conflict resolution to the detriment of being able to learn any other skills or really appreciate the world in any other way. The "life of the party" while being just as dead inside as the introverted example above. They get trapped into a certain way of life from the brain damage. I'm definitely not advocating alcohol abuse just sharing my perspective. I'm pretty sure more people drink than abstain so this isn't a topic that can be dismissed as just purely bad. If anyone knows of research on this kind of topic that would be amazing. Too often this is only discussed via movies, ads, and personal stories which are all strongly biased.

sdze 4y ago

Is there something similar studied for cannabis?

rbanffy 4y ago

They may have gotten it backwards - more gray and white matter volumes could make the person more aware of the hopelessness of life in general and, therefore, induce alcohol consumption. ;-)