Doctors Just Found Something Horrifying in the Brains of Heavy Alcohol Drinkers

Boozers beware: a new study has found links between heavy alcohol consumption, brain damage, and earlier death.

As the American Academy of Neurology notes, Brazilian researchers established in a new study that heavy drinkers — defined as those who have "eight or more alcoholic drinks per week," so not a particularly gigantic quantity — have a greater risk of developing brain lesions that can cause issues with memory and cognitition.

Known as hyaline arteriolosclerosis, the lesions caused by this condition occur when small blood vessels in the brain narrow and become stiff and tight.

"This makes it harder for blood to flow," the press release notes, "which can damage the brain over time."

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Neurology, pathologists from the University of São Paulo looked at records, both pre- and postmortem, for nearly 1,800 subjects that were published in the United Kingdom's first-class Biobank health database. Cross-referencing brain autopsies with living health record details, the researchers grouped the subjects into four groups: those who never drank, moderate drinkers who had "seven or fewer drinks per week," people who used to drink heavily, and those who drank heavily until the time of their death.

Led by vascular biology expert Alberto Fernando Oliveira Justo, the researchers aimed not to establish any causal link but to demonstrate an understudied association — and did they ever.

The good news is that moderate drinkers and those who used to drink heavily but stopped by the time they died appeared, per the study, to have lower odds of developing brain lesions. The bad news: former heavy drinkers were still at greater risk of developing not just lesions, but also for tau tangles, a neurological biomarker associated with Alzheimer's and dementia.

While just 40 percent of the autopsied brains of teetotalers had brain lesions, the researchers found, after adjusting for other brain health factors like smoking and physical activity, that moderate drinkers had 60 percent higher odds of developing the lesions. Former heavy drinkers, meanwhile, had an 89 percent increased risk, and people who drank heavily up until death had 133 percent higher odds.

"Researchers also found heavy and former heavy drinkers had higher odds of developing tau tangles... with 41 [percent] and 31 [percent] higher odds, respectively," the press release notes. "Former heavy drinking was associated with a lower brain mass ratio, a smaller proportion of brain mass compared to body mass, and worse cognitive abilities."

To make matters worse, the researchers' data analyses suggested that lifetime heavy drinkers died, on average, 13 years younger than people who never touched the stuff.

"We found heavy drinking is directly linked to signs of injury in the brain," Justo said in the press release, "and this can cause long-term effects on brain health, which may impact memory and thinking abilities."

As with any study, this research had its limitations. Because the database these records were gleaned from is based in the UK, the randomized patients whose records the researchers analyzed were not known to them, and therefore, they didn't know how long they'd been drinking — only, it seems, that some never drank a drop while others kept drinking up until the bitter end.

Still, these grim findings may encourage those with a history of hitting the sauce to slow down — or, perhaps, persuade others from going too hard moving forward.

More on your brain on booze: Test Shows Alcohol Causing Long-Term Brain Damage

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