Drinking has a lot of downsides. There are hangovers, for starters. Dehydration. Whiskey dick. But a new study has uncovered another concerning side effect of alcohol: brain shrinkage.
The research, which was published in the journal Nature, studied data from 36,000 people in the UK and involved self-reports of alcohol consumption along with MRI brain scans. The results suggest that a sole pint of beer or one glass of wine daily may make your brain’s volume drop. The more you drink, the more the brain shrivels and ages. So people who, at age 50, drink a pint of beer or a 6-ounce glass of wine will likely appear to have brains that are two years older than those who only drink half a beer a day. If you’re a heavy drinker, your brain could age as many as 10 years.
“It gets worse the more you drink,” Remi Daviet, an assistant professor of marketing in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.
While small amounts of alcohol are considered to be beneficial to some aspects of health (like heart disease or diabetes), they can also be damaging to others (like breast cancer).
But, come on, is anyone out there worried about the size of their brain? Probably not. What we really need to know, smartypants, is if you discover that alcohol consumption causes shrinkage in *other* areas. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll consider getting sober.
Cover Photo: AaronAmat (Getty Images)
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