Good news for all you people 60 years old and up who just love your alcohol so much you can’t even think about giving it up— studies suggest that drinking over the age of 60 actually be good for your health, increasing your memory!
The Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort studied a group of 660 people. According to Fox News, “Scientists surveyed the participants on their alcohol consumption and demographics, a battery of neuropsychological assessments, the presence or absence of the genetic Alzheimer’s disease risk factor APOE e4 and MRIs of their brains.” The article does not mention male or female. It seems to be an observational study to me, the researchers did not set up and experiment to get the results, they based results off of the surveys.
In Medical Daily’s article on the same topic and study they mention the results,“late life, but not midlife, alcohol consumption status is associated with episodic memory and hippocampal volume…moderate consumers had larger hippocampal volume, and light consumers had higher episodic memory.” This consumption would be no more than two drinks a day for a man and one for a woman.
Although they got results from a wide range of people there could defiantly be other variables affecting them. Things that need to be taken into consideration is their past with drinking, do people who were heavy drinkers in the past also have higher memory? Why people over age 60, does it help to have a drink or two a day at age 21 too? This link can just be due to chance, maybe the older people who drink get, the less alcohol they start consuming and things start looking up for them— hence the increased memory and hippocampus size. I feel the study was lacking information to share with its readers, they just mention that there were assessments done without stating exactly how they were. I can’t doubt their accuracy but I feel I need more information to assess the study.
If I were to do the study over again, I would take a large number of women and men starting at age 50 and watch them until age 70. I would record their drinking habits of the past by giving them a survey of how many drinks they averaged on a daily basis, I would separate the group into drinkers and nondrinkers. I would give the drinkers each a drink or two—depending on their sex—daily and record the results of their memory. I would also do this to the nondrinkers. I think that the experiment mentioned earlier needs to have a control group to compare the results too. I also think that it needs to include the drinkers history of drinking because heavier drinking in the past may have a huge effect on the brain. After doing so I would compare the results and see if they were improving. Usually memory starts to go as you get older and genetics may also play a huge role, so I am confused as to how the results said that memory increased.
I find this crazy because alcohol is usually linked to things like brain damage and negative effects on the body. The studies and articles are not suggesting that you should go drink one/two drinks a day because not drinking at all is obviously better then drinking, but instead letting you know that it may not be the worse thing to do if its already being done. I don’t feel the study gives enough information to prove that it is in fact good for your memory over age 60. But then again it is suggesting that it really can’t hurt. Moderation is key to this!
I’ve always heard the red wine is good for people 60 and over. I recently read that red wine, in moderation (like everything else), has been thought of as heart healthy. The alcohol and other substances in red wine called antioxidants may help prevent heart disease by increasing levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol which is the good cholesterol in your body. Therefore, keeping your arteries strong and intact. However, scientists still haven’t concluded that wine is any better than beer in the long run.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281