Could Drinking Delay Dementia?

Ivanhoe Newswire
Tuesday, May 22, 2007; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A recent study reveals a few sips of alcohol each day could keep dementia at bay in people suffering from mild cognitive impairment.

Mild cognitive impairment is defined as a decline in cognitive function that is not attributable to the standard aging process. There are two basic types: amnestic mild cognitive impairment, which primarily affects the memory, and non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment, which does not affect the memory. Both forms can make it difficult for people to speak, maintain their attention span, reason, read, write, and problem solve. In some cases, mild cognitive impairment serves as a precursor to dementia, a condition that can cause people to forget who they are, where they are, and what time period they are living in.

When Italian researchers studied patients with mild cognitive impairment, they found those who had one drink of alcohol each day developed dementia at a rate that was 85 percent slower than those with mild cognitive impairment who refrained from drinking alcohol altogether.

"This is the first study to look at how alcohol consumption affects the rate of progression of mild cognitive impairment to dementia," Vincenzo Solfrizzi, M.D., Ph.D., from the Department of Geriatrics at the University of Bari in Italy, is quoted as saying. He also reported that drinking more than one alcoholic beverage per day did not slow the onset of dementia any more than drinking a single alcoholic beverage per day.

Researchers are still unsure why consuming small amounts of alcohol each day appears to delay the onset of dementia, but they did report wine was the drink of choice for participants who enjoyed libations regularly and developed dementia later on than their peers. The study authors suggest alcohol may altar the arrangement of blood vessels in the brain in a protective manner. They also report the hypothesis lends credence to other studies that have shown alcohol can protect people against debilitating conditions like stroke and vascular dementia.

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SOURCE: Neurology, published online May 21, 2007