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Title: One to Six Drinks A Week Associated With Lower Dementia Risk In Older Adults

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JAMA, 2003;289:1405-1413.
03/19/2003 03:01:34 PM
By Elda Hauschildt

Adults over 65 years old who have one to six alcoholic drinks a week are at lower risk of incident dementia than those who do not consume alcohol, say researchers in the United States. "Abstainers had odds of dementia that were about twice as high as the odds among consumers of between one and six drinks per week," they report, after a case control study that was nested in a large population-based cohort of older adults. Investigators from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Harvard School of Public Health, both in Boston, Massachusetts, the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington in Seattle, say that because of the many physiological effects associated with alcohol use and the observational nature of the study, "our findings should be extrapolated to clinical care with great caution." The nested case-control study included 373 cases with incident dementia and 373 controls. Controls were frequency- matched on age, death before 1999 and attendance at a 1998/1999 clinic. Participants were among 5,888 adults, 65 years or older, taking part in the Cardiovascular Health Study, a prospective, population-based cohort study in four US states: North Carolina, California, Maryland and Pennsylvania. They underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and cognitive testing between 1992 and 1994 and were followed until 1999. Adjusted odds for dementia among those drinking less than 1 drink a week was 0.65. It was 0.46 for those drinking 1 to 6 drinks a week, 0.69 for those drinking 7 to 13 drinks per week and 1.22 for those consuming 14 or more drinks weekly. "A trend toward greater odds of dementia associated with heavier alcohol consumption was most apparent among men and among participants with an apolipoprotein E epsilon4 allele," they note. The investigators also found "generally similar" relationships between alcohol use and Alzheimer disease and vascular dementia.

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