Eight or more drinks per week linked to brain lesions
80 comments
·April 11, 2025bbarn
muglug
On paper the ones who died as heavy drinkers fare slightly better brain-wise, but they die earlier (according to the study). Quitting heavy drinking may mean you live longer, but with an impaired brain.
SOLAR_FIELDS
The old adage always rings true. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The devil is always in the details
smt88
"Former heavy drinkers" is going to include more people who already started having health issues than the group of current heavy drinkers
kstrauser
It also excludes people who died of it. No telling what their rate might be.
imtringued
The average age of death being 75 not only excludes heavy drinkers who didn't make it, but also excludes all the healthy people who made it well into their 80s and 90s.
profsummergig
Thank you for digging into the details and displaying their clear ridiculousness. As someone who finished a 750ml bottle (17 drinks) over 4 days this week, the headline had me freaking out. Whew.
beAbU
Wait. A bottle of wine is 17 drinks?!
Or did you finish a bottle of hard liquor in four days?
yial
It would have to be hard liquor. A shot is 1.5 oz / 44 ml =1 drink. 750/17=44.118
profsummergig
It was an interesting week.[1]
[1] See: the stock market chart.
remram
Those are very small variations. I would look for confounding factors, e.g. income levels, mental health, etc that could easily explain a few percent difference.
Looking at the full paper, specific factors were accounted for but the list seems kind of short for such a small statistical result. The paper acknowledge that racial minorities have a higher incidence but the data doesn't seem to contain income information... yeah.
Honestly I'm mostly surprised it came out so small.
crummy
If I had brain lesions, I'd probably take up heavy drinking, too.
triyambakam
Why be depressed when you can be inebriated?
wut-wut
Well done!
bentt
This headline is way more sure of itself than the actual data.
boomboomsubban
Brain legions seem to be caused by trauma to the head, along with other things, so this doesn't seem that surprising? Both "most risk averse people drink less" and "most drinkers engage in more risky behavior" are generally accepted ideas.
satvikpendem
"No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" [0]. Always interesting to see the responses of people to this scientific fact.
[0] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
strictnein
It probably gets negative responses because people are tired of seeing it posted any time alcohol is mentioned. It's becoming like people saying they're vegan or they do crossfit any time food or exercise is mentioned.
Alcohol isn't good for me, but I simply don't care.
hall0ween
pwnd
ViktorRay
Perhaps the responses are less to the fact and more to the smug moralizing manner in which certain people point this out.
satvikpendem
Nothing is moralizing about it, it's a neutral fact, but people just don't like it being pointed out to them. By all means, drink if you want, but many people seem to think it confers some health benefit which has been debunked, that's all that this article is talking about.
intrasight
There may have been a time when informed, intelligent people thought that alcohol had health benefits - but that time was many years ago now.
tbrownaw
> To identify a “safe” level of alcohol consumption, valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption. The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
This does not say that it is known to be unsafe.
This says that there is not sufficient data to know that it is safe.
These are very different things, and presenting the later as is it was the former ~~is dishonest~~ showcases the poor level of statistical literacy that even most otherwise knowledgeable people have.
moi2388
Which is nonsense, if I drink a glass once a year absolutely nothing bad whatsoever will happen.
Even oxygen is worse - for one the withdrawal symptoms are much more severe
majkinetor
This is simply not true and is probably some Huberman conspiracy or something...
Any poison has hormetic effect. Claiming otherwise is irresponsible and incompetent.
000ooo000
Yes, Andrew Huberman infiltrated the World Health Organisation and convinced them to lie about safe levels of alcohol consumption.
thunkle
> Of those who never drank, 40% had vascular brain lesions. Of the moderate drinkers, 45% had vascular brain lesions. Of the heavy drinkers, 44% had vascular brain lesions. Of the former heavy drinkers, 50% had vascular brain lesions.
I mean when you put it that way it doesn't seem so bad.
throwaway7783
Yeah, it almost reads like "if you have to drink, drink heavy and don't stop drinking" - that seems to be the least harmful category other than not drinking at all!
doubled112
> impaired cognitive abilities were observed only in former drinkers.
Have to keep drinking or you’ll experience a loss in cognitive abilities.
ergonaught
Yeah. The 40% seems like the interesting bit.
bbarn
Yeah, the fact that 40% get them regardless makes the slight increases seem.. statistically irrelevant?
mikeyouse
It turns out we in fact have tests to determine statistical significance - and the fact that this study was peer reviewed and published means the results were indeed statistically significant!
> We included 1,781 participants (mean age 74.9 ± 12.5 years, mean education 4.8 ± 4.0 years, 49.6% women, and 64.1% White). Compared with participants who never consumed alcohol, moderate (odds ratio [OR] 1.60, 95% CI 1.19–2.15, p = 0.001), heavy (OR 2.33, 95% CI 1.50–3.63, p < 0.001), and former heavy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.41–2.54, p < 0.001) alcohol consumptions were associated with hyaline arteriolosclerosis while only heavy (OR 1.41, 95% CI 1.10–2.30, p = 0.012) and former heavy (OR 1.31, 95% CI 1.02–1.68, p = 0.029) alcohol consumptions were associated with neurofibrillary tangles. Former heavy drinking was associated with a lower brain mass ratio (β −4.45, 95% CI −8.55 to −0.35, p = 0.033) and worse cognitive abilities (β 1.31, 95% CI 0.54–2.09, p < 0.001). The association between impaired cognitive abilities and alcohol consumption was fully mediated by hyaline arteriolosclerosis (β 0.13, 95% CI 0.02–0.22, p = 0.012).
tbrownaw
Being statistically significant is about how good your measurement is. (In one particular way.)
It's entirely unrelated to being practically significant.
karaterobot
Engage defensive skepticism mode!
triyambakam
It's frustrating that the definition of "drinks" varies and even when defined is not easy to adjust for various types of alcohol. So much easier to measure by units of alcohol. Just multiply ml of drink by percentage of alcohol and divide by 1000.
0_____0
It is widely standardized as 1 drink = 14g of alcohol, a definition that isn't affected by type of drink.
quicklime
Where I live, and it seems in most places in the world, a standard drink is 10g of alcohol.
> The definition of what constitutes a standard drink varies very widely between countries,[2] with what each country defines as the amount of pure alcohol in a standard drink ranging from 8 to 20 grams.
> The sample questionnaire form for the World Health Organization's Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) uses 10 g (0.35 oz),[3] and this definition has been adopted by more countries than any other amount.
koolba
> Where I live, and it seems in most places in the world, a standard drink is 10g of alcohol.
That is a weak pour. Not even an ounce of hooch. I definitely would not go back to that bar.
NaOH
As a reference for folks, 14g of a liquid that pours like water is one tablespoon.
dchuk
Who on earth knows what 14g of alcohol is in terms of visiting a bar?
ab71e5
Beer is about 5%, so 14 times 20 = 280ml of beer, pretty standard beer glass size
MathMonkeyMan
12 oz of 5% alcohol by volume water (let's say beer) has what mass of alcohol?
0.05 * (12 oz * ~30 mL/oz * ~800 mg alcohol / mL) = ~14 grams alcohol
Gigachad
If it’s prepackaged (not from a tap), it’ll say on the packaging how many standard drinks it is.
PontifexMinimus
Note that a 568 ml pint of beer of 5% strength is by this definition 2 drinks.
4 pints over a week is basically nothing, and if they are saying it causes ill health, I don't believe them. When I was a student I drank 10 times that amount, so did many of my friends, without any apparent ill effects.
satvikpendem
> Note that a 568 ml pint of beer of 5% strength is by this definition 2 drinks.
Yes it is. I can always tell the difference between drinking a can of it versus a pint, it definitely does feel like twice the effects.
> if they are saying it causes ill health, I don't believe them
I mean you can believe whatever you want but the scientific consensus is that any amount of alcohol is bad for you [0]. Just because you and your friends didn't have ill effects does not mean that it was actually good or even neutral for you all, and statistically and biologically it's been shown to not be so either.
[0] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
anyfoo
Either way, I struggle to find a likely definition of "drinks" where 8 per week does not seem excessive.
Like even if "half a pint of beer" is the definition (unlikely), that means drinking 4 pints of beer per week, throughout a long time? I.e. not just for 2 weeks in a row or so? That does not fit my definition of "social drinking" anymore.
And mind you that that's a purposefully underestimating assumption. The actual definition of a drink is likely larger than half a pint of beer.
thot_experiment
Always interesting to see different perspectives, visiting my aunt (almost 70yo) it was half a liter of beer with lunch, and another half with dinner as kind of just a normal thing. Maybe not every day but also some days you'll have another after dinner. Nobody thinks twice about that level of consumption, there is zero negative stigma.
Even if someone gets a little drunk most evenings it's not thought of as a problem, work meetings are had over beers after lunch. Life expectancy exceeds that of the United States, so personally to have someone say 8 beers a week is excessive is mindboggling to me.
intrasight
Survivorship bias
zeroonetwothree
Most people don’t think that one per day is excessive. 8 is only a bit more than that.
hyperadvanced
I think a bog standard IPA is about 2 “units” of alcohol. I like the old alcoholic “I’ll only have one or two” and it’s a wine glass filled to the brim or a mason jar half full of whiskey
intrasight
I've recently had to admit to myself that my standard can of IPA is in fact two beers.
jeffbee
Whether 8 standard drinks per week becomes heavy or not would seem to depend on one's own body mass.
thefz
8 total or all in one sitting?
jrflowers
I like how “not drinking at all” is linked to brain lesions at nearly the same rate
zabzonk
> Heavy drinkers who have eight or more alcoholic drinks per week
So if you have about one drink a day you are doomed (and a "heavy" drinker)? Experience tells that this is simply not the case, and is crap promulgated by mad the mad teetotal faction.
boomboomsubban
One drink a day is seven a week. If your family describe you as regularly having more, I doubt you're having eight. More likely you're getting drunk on a regular basis.
zabzonk
If I have a glass of wine with a meal I'm a drunk. Thanks. But it is my life.
boomboomsubban
The cohorts are fairly clearly separated into "doesn't drink," "drinks moderately," and "drinks heavily." They have to define them somehow, and "regularly drinks more than one drink a day" seems like a good way to do so.
I'm sure some people are misclassified in both groups. If you're improperly classified because once a week you have two glasses of wine rather than one, I doubt your risk is that much higher. That said, moderate and heavy drinkers saw the same rates.
null
jeromegv
Looks like you’re in denial. It’s not about what is socially acceptable, it’s about the health impact.
zabzonk
In denial about what? Did I mention social acceptability? I questioned that one drink a day was harmful.
satvikpendem
> I questioned that one drink a day was harmful.
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
Of those who never drank, 40% had vascular brain lesions. Of the moderate drinkers, 45% had vascular brain lesions. Of the heavy drinkers, 44% had vascular brain lesions. Of the former heavy drinkers, 50% had vascular brain lesions.
So, I read this as "If you're a heavy drinker, it's better than being moderate or ever stopping"
Statistics are fun.