While studies regarding the right levels of alcohol consumption remain cloudy - with some studies warning about its harmful effects and others touting its benefits - a new Oxford-led study could put all to rest, saying that there are no safe levels when it comes to drinking.
Researchers from the University of Oxford, in the pre-print report "No safe level of alcohol consumption for brain health: observational cohort study of 25,378 UK Biobank participants" currently at the repository medRxiv, strongly concludes that there are no safe levels when it comes to alcohol consumption. Additionally, it calls for experts to revisit existing "low risk drinking guidelines" to better take account of brain effects.
No Safe Levels in Alcohol Consumption
To arrive at their stark conclusion, researchers evaluated the "world's largest imaging sample" with data from the UK Biobank, which was described by local publication The Guardian as "a substantial database" that helps researchers identify possible genetic and environmental factors that lead to the development of diseases.
For the Oxford cohort study, researchers took MRI brain scans from 43,572 participants, evaluating each of their alcohol consumption. After obtaining these two critical pieces of information, researchers then worked on building the differences in the participants based on how much did they drink.
The data shows that higher levels of alcohol consumption led to lower levels of grey matter, the component of the brain that contains neurons or brain cells. According to their report, alcohol consumption was responsible for up to 0.8 percent of volume variations in the presence of grey matter.
Contrary to Previous Studies on Drinking
To further stress the effect alcohol consumption singlehandedly has, researchers report that "alcohol made a larger contribution than any other modifiable risk factor tested, including smoking." They add that even removing health factors such as blood pressure and cholesterol from their probabilistic models "made no difference" to alcohol.
The new Oxford study contradicts previous research that suggests the benefit of drinking wine in moderation, compared to beer or other spirits. In the pre-print available, there seems to be no difference in the type of alcoholic beverage. Researchers believe that the favorable association between wine-drinking to health is caused by higher educational attainment and socioeconomic status.
"If you look at who is moderately drinking, at least in this country, they are better educated, wealthier people that would do much better on a memory test ... just because of who they are, than people that are less educated," said Anya Topiwala, lead author of the study and a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Oxford, in the report from The Guardian.
Overall, the findings presented in the new study - which suggests that there are no safe levels to alcohol consumption - are "robust to many alternative assumptions," according to Colin Angus, senior fellow from the University of Sheffield." He explains that these effects appear small, but he notes that it's difficult to compare these effects to other health effects of alcohol such as cancer, without additional studies.
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