Alcohol Abuse - the fastest way to dementia

In the journal The Lancet Public Health recently published the results of a large-scale study, the purpose of which was to find out the effect of alcohol consumption on the human body. The main conclusion can be called quite expected - the abuse of alcoholic beverages is one of the main factors in the appearance of dementia, of all its types. This is especially true for the early form of dementia.

According to the authors, their research is the largest among all the works on the study of the effect of alcohol on the human body. During the project, scientists analyzed the medical data of people with various forms of dementia, dementia. Data sampling - several tens of thousands of people, both with and without symptoms of dementia.

As it turned out, out of 57,000 cases of early dementia (up to 65 years old), the main factor that led to the appearance of the disease was alcohol abuse, which was observed in 57% of cases of the onset of the early form of dementia. According to experts from the World Health Organization, daily use of 60 grams of pure alcohol for men and 40 grams for women is considered an abuse.

Scientists who participated in the project believe that one of the ways to reduce the likelihood of dementia is to reduce the consumption of alcoholic beverages. “The results of our work clearly show that there is a close relationship between dementia and chronic alcohol abuse. Therefore, the treatment of alcoholism is a reliable way to prevent dementia, ”the specialists say.

Alcoholic beverages lead to a deterioration of the human brain, and it becomes more susceptible to the appearance of various diseases. The latter, related to alcoholism, reduce the life expectancy of people by an average of 20 years. Moreover, dementia is one of the most common diseases that are fatal in a large number of cases.

By the way, if you take the global statistics of the disease, then most often dementia appears in women. But early dementia is the lot of men. According to statistics, in the United States, this type of dementia most often affects men (64.9% of all cases).

But not only alcohol is one of the risk factors. They also include smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes of various types, low levels of education, depression, etc.

“As a specialist, I often come across cases of early dementia, aggravated by the patient’s abuse of alcohol. I believe that treatment for alcoholism and simply stopping regular alcohol consumption is the best way to prevent dementia, ”one of the study participants said.

By the way, recently an article was published on Geektimes, which pointed out another risk factor - it is weak physical activity. Exercise improves the condition of the whole human body and helps prevent Alzheimer's disease. This is evidenced by the results of research of the O'Donnell Brain Institute. A low level of physical activity leads to a decrease in cognitive functions, including memory impairment, which is very typical for patients with dementia.

"This study confirms the hypothesis that physical activity can improve the state of the brain and slow down the aging process," said the author of the study.

In this paper, scientists studied the state of the white matter of the brain. It is a component of the central nervous system, which consists mainly of axon bundles that are covered with myelin. The axons themselves are specialized processes of the nerve cell that transmit nerve impulses to the tissues of various organs or to other neurons. So, scientists were able to determine that the lack of physical activity is closely related to the deterioration of the white matter. And it, in turn, affects the ability of the brain to perform various functions.

True, it remains unclear how actively you need to play sports or remain physically active in order to avoid the onset of Alzheimer's disease or at least reduce the likelihood of this disease. If the symptoms have already appeared - is it possible, while playing sports, to stop or at least reduce the rate of the onset of the disease? These questions remain unanswered so far, but another team of scientists from the O'Donnell Brain Institute is working to clarify all this as part of a five-year study of Risk Reduction for Alzheimer's Disease (rrAD) , which covered six medical centers in the United States.