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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33351 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Unfortunately, yes, small amounts of alcohol have a detectable effect on brain white and gray matter volume:

Specifically, alcohol intake is negatively associated with global brain volume measures, regional gray matter volumes, and white matter microstructure. Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.

Here "one unit" means 10ml of ethanol, slivovitz has 50% abv, so you're drinking 350ml ethanol per 14 days = 2.5 alcohol units per day. The paper I linked has a bunch of interesting figures (fig 3 in particular is nice), and they provide this useful comparison:

For illustration, the effect associated with a change from one to two daily alcohol units is equivalent to the effect of aging 2 years (or 1.7 years in the model that excludes individuals who consume a high level of alcohol), where the increase from two to three daily units is equivalent to aging 3.5 years (or 2.9 years in the model that excludes individuals who consume a high level of alcohol).

Going from 0 to 1 daily units doesn't have any measurable effect in that study, but going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 does. So with your 2.5 units/day, it's equivalent to an aging-related decrease in brain volume of around 3.75 years. Not world-ending in any sense, but still not nothing.

(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)

Additional analyses excluding abstainers (N = 33,733) or excluding individuals who consume a high level of alcohol (i.e., females who report consuming more than 18 units/week and males who report consuming more than 24 units/week) (N = 34,383) and models using an extended set of covariates (including BMI, educational attainment, and weight; N = 36,678) yield similar findings, though the variance explained by alcohol intake beyond other control variables is reduced to 0.4% for GMV and 0.1% for WMV when individuals who consume a high level of alcohol are excluded (Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).

I mean, alcohol accounting for 0.4% of variance doesn't seem very important.

(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)

My first thought is that this implies reverse causality. If a snapshot shows the result without expect to duration, a parsimonious explanation would be that people with diminished brain matter tend to drink more rather than that drinking causes diminished brain matter. Feedback loops would be unsurprising as well.

Yeah that's what I thought too, but they super-duper promise they accounted for confounders:

We perform a preregistered analysis of multimodal imaging data from the UK Biobank (UKB)42,43,44, which controls for numerous potential confounds.

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