Booze ups dementia risk

2005-12-01 08:15

Helsinki - Repeatedly drinking alcohol to the point of drunkenness triples the risk of dementia later in life, one of the authors of a Finnish study on the subject said on Wednesday.

"If you drink a great amount of alcohol on one occasion, at least once a month, the risk of dementia is three times higher (than in someone who does not regularly consume the equivalent of a bottle of wine in a single drinking session), even if you are sober in between," said Juha Rinne, a neurologist at the Turku University in southwestern Finland and co-author of the study.

And for people who go so far as to pass out at least twice a year, the risk of developing mental illness is 10 times higher, he said.

"We have shown that it is not necessarily the amount of alcohol but the drinking pattern which influences the risk of dementia," Rinne said.

Study applicable to young people

The researchers, who questioned 554 men and women in telephone interviews between 1975 to 1981 and 1999 to 2001, took into consideration some of the more common factors linked to an increased risk of dementia: age, gender and education, with uneducated women figuring at the top of the risk scale.

Although only people over the age of 65 were questioned, Rinne said the study's findings also applied to younger generations since drinking habits did not tend to change much with age.

The study, conducted by Turku University and the Institute of National Public Health and published in the November issue of scientific journal Epidemiology, revealed alcohol in excess may be "an independent risk factor for cognitive degeneration, other than alcoholic dementia, like Alzheimer and vascular dementia", Rinne said.

While the link between alcohol excess and dementia has previously been established, most studies only look at short periods of time (up to six years), and do not distinguish between different types of drinking habits, he said.

- AFP