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One Alcoholic Drink Daily Helps Women Have Better
Minds in Old Age
Jan. 20, 2005 A new study published yesterday
says women who want to have a good mind in their old age should drink a
glass of alcoholic beverage on a daily basis.
The women who consumed a beer or a glass of wine
daily tended to have the mental agility of someone a year and a half
younger than non-drinkers.
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Drinking more than one glass of alcoholic beverage
didn't produce a greater benefit, they said. Although, few of the nurses
in the study were heavy drinkers.
Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH)
and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), in an analysis between 1995
and 2001, the authors evaluated cognitive function in 12,480
participants in the Nurses' Health Study who were 70 to 81
years old, with follow-up assessments in 11,102 two years
later. They found that compared to women who were nondrinkers, older
women who consumed one drink per day experienced less cognitive
impairment.
Specifically, such moderate consumption of alcohol
seemed to produce a 20 percent reduced risk of cognitive impairment.
These findings are published in the January 20, 2005 issue of the New
England Journal of Medicine.
"Much evidence has demonstrated the heart benefits
of light alcohol drinking, but less research has focused on cognitive
functioning. While we all continue to recommend exercising caution when
consuming any type of alcohol, our study suggests that moderate
consumption might provide older women some cognitive benefits.
Additional research needs to be conducted to better understand the links
between alcohol and cognitive function," says senior author, BWH's
Francine Grodstein, ScD.
This study was released on the heels of the release
of the governments new 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which
also tends to support moderate drinking. It says, Those who choose to
drink alcoholic beverages should do so sensibly and in moderation, and
defined moderation as up to one drink per day for women and up to two
drinks per day for men. For purposes of explaining moderation, the
guidelines count as a drink five ounces of wine, 12 ounces of regular
beer or 1 1/2 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits.
In this study, alcohol consumption data was
collected as part of food-frequency questionnaires issued every few
years between 1980 and 1998. Alcohol intake was measured in grams of
beer, wine and liquor, with moderate consumption --one glass per day --
defined as less than 15 grams per day.
Then, from 1995-2002, women participated in
telephone-based cognitive surveys in which general cognition and verbal
memory and fluency were evaluated. Women who were classified as moderate
drinkers -- those who consumed less than 15 grams of alcohol per day -
had better mean cognitive scores than nondrinkers. In addition,
researchers found no significant difference in cognitive functioning
among the nondrinkers and those who consumed more than one drink per
day. Also, there did not seem to be any substantial difference in the
effects of different forms of alcoholic beverages.
"These findings add to the results of previous
studies which assessed alcohol consumption and cognitive functioning,"
said HSPH's Meir Stampfer, MD and chair of the Department of
Epidemiology. "Given our large study population, this body of research
is now powerful enough to suggest continued research to ultimately
better understand the impact moderate alcohol has on cognitive
function."
Stampfer participated in an earlier study of data
from the Nurses' Health Study that concluded, Among women, adherence to
lifestyle guidelines involving diet, exercise, and abstinence
from smoking is associated with a very low risk of coronary
heart disease.
Loss of cognitive function in old age, especially
severe cognitive loss due to Alzheimer's disease, is a
serious public health problem that will only increase as the
number of people in the oldest age groups increases in the
United States and other developed countries, wrote Denis A.
Evans, M.D., and Julia L. Bienias, ScD., in an editorial that
accompanied the study.
Effective
preventive measures are the key to coping with this
potentially overwhelming problem as it emerges and are even
more important than is treatment of affected persons.
Unfortunately, very few effective means of either prevention
or treatment have been identified to date. Studies that
provide clues about prevention are therefore welcome.
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