Drinking Too Much Alcohol May Increase Dementia Risk

Science now links drinking alcohol with developing dementia in your life. Contradictoraly, drinking alcohol has been linked to increased cardiovascular health. In between these two conditions is a lot of ambiguous information about how alcohol use contributes to health. Early onset dementia is strongly associated with alcohol use disorders, correlated with a three times increased risk for dementia when a person has an alcohol use disorder. Light to moderate use of alcohol and how it contributes to the development of dementia is unclear. The CDC defines heavy alcohol usage as about one drink per day for women and about double that for men. That is actually a moderate amount for many people as it’s a drink or two per day such as with dinner. Many people drink much, much more than that. So alcohol intake varies greatly and many who would fall within the “heavy usage” category actually have a very large amount of variation, which contributes to the blurring of understanding of results when analyzing alcohol use and development of dementia. One or two drinks a day is considered good for cardiovascular health, leaving people unclear how to determine results of analysis. Alcohol use is found to be helpful in some cases and detrimental in others so results of analysis can only be called inconclusive.