A new study suggests that any level of drinking can literally damage your brain, according to CNN.
What did the new drinking study say?
A new study — which hasn’t been peer-reviewed — from the University of Oxford found that drinking can impact your brain’s gray matter, which is where information gets processed.
The study reviewed 25,000 people’s self-reported alcohol use and how it impacted brain scans.
- “The more people drank, the less the volume of their gray matter,” said lead author Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at Oxford, according to CNN.
- “Brain volume reduces with age and more severely with dementia. Smaller brain volume also predicts worse performance on memory testing.”
- The researchers in this study also found there was no “safe” level of drinking. So that means drinking any level of alcohol made your brain worse than not drinking at all, per CNN.
Is there a safe level of drinking?
In 2018, there was a study published in The Lancet that found there’s “no safe level of alcohol.” The study reviewed drinking habits for 28 million people worldwide to determine how alcohol impacts the body.
The study found alcohol can negatively impact your body’s organs and cause injuries, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
“Previous studies have found a protective effect of alcohol on some conditions, but we found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increase with any amount of alcohol,” lead author Dr. Max Griswold, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said in a statement to CBS News. “In particular, the strong association between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases offset the protective effects for ischemic heart disease in women in our study.”