Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, March 8th. "Reference News" published on the 7th Efe News Agency report "The latest study shows that a glass of beer a day can damage the brain".

The report summary is as follows:

  Everyone knows that drinking too much alcohol can damage the brain, but is it okay to drink a few sips less?

Even just a few glasses of wine or beer a week can be harmful, according to a new study published in the UK's Nature Communications.

  To understand the extent to which alcohol consumption is harmful, an international team led by the University of Pennsylvania analyzed data from more than 36,000 adults and found that both low and moderate drinking led to a reduction in total brain volume.

  The researchers proved that the more alcohol you drank, the stronger the relationship was.

For example, in a 50-year-old, as an individual's average alcohol consumption increased from 1 unit of alcohol per day (about 240 ml of beer) to 2 units, the change in brain volume was equivalent to two years of aging.

The 50-year-old's drinking increased from 2 units to 3 units, with consequences equivalent to 3 1/2 years of aging.

  "We had a very large sample, so we were able to find subtle patterns and find the difference between even half a beer and one beer a day," said Gideon Neff, lead author of the study and a Wharton faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. difference."

  To date, many studies have analyzed the relationship between alcohol consumption and brain health, but the results have been equivocal and lack a lot of data to prove it.

The study was based on MRI scans of the brains of more than 36,000 adults from the UK Biobank, a huge database of genetic data from 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 used for free access to scientific research.

  Volunteer participants in the Biobank answered survey questions about their alcohol consumption, ranging from no drink to an average of 4 or more units of alcohol per day.

  When the participants were grouped by average alcohol consumption, the researchers found a small but clear pattern -- a reduction in the amount of gray and white matter in individuals.

Drinking alcohol from zero to 1 unit per day did not have much effect on brain volume, but increasing from 1 to 2 units, or from 2 to 3 units, resulted in a reduction in both gray and white matter.