How regular heavy drinking can lead to dementia
There is one notable risk with regular heavy drinking that is often overlooked. Here’s how to stop it.
Heavy drinking? Among a litany of potential health problems, there is one notable risk with excessive alcohol consumption that appears to be widely overlooked.
“People don’t realise that alcohol can cause dementia,” says Rowena Mobbs, associate professor of neurology at the Queensland Brain Institute.
Dementia is a process where parts of the brain cease to function properly and leads to cognitive decline. A variety of underlying causes include Alzheimer’s disease.
Alcohol-related dementia, also known as alcohol-related brain injury (ARBI), is damage caused by consuming alcohol at risky levels for many years.
Accounting for around 1 per cent of all dementia cases, excessive drinking over a sustained period can cause brain cells to die, leading to cognitive decline. This can manifest as memory loss, mood swings and personality changes.
The longer and more regularly you drink at risky levels, the more likely you are to develop ARBI. The damage can rarely be rectified.
“Unfortunately, once brain cells have died there is no way we can reverse that damage,” says Dr Kaele Stokes, executive director of service advocacy and research at Dementia Australia. “But slowing or ceasing drinking alcohol can prevent any further cognitive decline.”
So what constitutes heavy drinking? To reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-related disease, the Australian Alcohol Guidelines recommend that people who are not pregnant and are over 18 consume no more than 10 standard drinks a week, and no more than four standard drinks on any one day.
“If you are drinking multiple glasses of wine or multiple beers every day, that’s probably beyond what’s deemed to be an appropriate level of alcohol,” says Dr Stokes.
As for who can develop this form of brain injury, any regular heavy drinker is at risk, although Dementia Australia says men over 45 and with a long history of heavy drinking are the most common group.
Most people who drink regularly and heavily do not develop ARBI. It is not yet clear why, although damage to brain cells from insufficient thiamine (vitamin B1) is known to be a factor. Thiamine helps turn food into energy and is needed for the brain to function properly.
According to Dementia Australia, if you regularly consume alcohol at risky levels over an extended time, you won’t get enough thiamine, in part because alcohol worsens your body’s ability to absorb the vitamin. If you don’t have enough thiamine, your brain cells can become damaged and die.
Alcohol-related dementia, unlike, say, vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, with treatment and support will not always worsen over time, according to the UK’s Alzheimer’s Society. “For example, if the person stops drinking alcohol, takes high doses of thiamine and starts eating a balanced diet. However, if the person keeps drinking alcohol and doesn’t eat well, alcohol-related dementia is very likely to get worse.”
While the outcome can be dire, alcohol-related dementia is also preventable, says Dr Mobbs. “If one doesn’t drink heavily, one avoids it, simple as that.”
