TOPLINE:
Study findings underscored that with regard to the risk for dementia in White individuals of British descent, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
METHODOLOGY:
A linear and non-linear mendelian randomisation (MR) analysis within a population of White British drinkers within the UK Biobank (recruited between 2006 and 2010) to explore the causal association between light-to-moderate alcohol consumption and the risk for dementia.
Alcohol consumption was self-reported weekly/monthly intake of various types; alcohol consumption was categorised as safe (≤ 14 units/week) and unsafe (> 14 units/week) per Alcohol Change UK and UK Department of Health Guidelines.
The primary outcome was all-cause dementia identified in hospital and mortality records.
Cox models were utilised for convention analysis, linear/non-linear MR based on a genetic score calculated from 95 single-nucleotide polymorphisms from a meta-genome study of 941,280 Europeans.
TAKEAWAY:
Of 313,958 current drinkers consuming a median of 13.60 units of alcohol/week (interquartile range, 7.10-25.20), 1.7% (n = 5394) were diagnosed with dementia (an average follow-up was 13.2 years [SD, 20]). In all, 48.6% (n = 152,644) consumed > 14 units/week.
Multivariate analysis demonstrated a J-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption and dementia risk in current drinkers; lowest dementia risk was associated with alcohol consumption of 11.9 units/week (men: 16.8 units/week, P = .04; women: 8.4 units/week, non-significant).
Summary-level MR analyses confirmed a positive link between genetically predicted alcohol intake and dementia risk across genders (weight median, overall predictive hazard ratio [PHR], 2.41 [95% CI, 1.76-3.30; P < .001]; for men, PHR, 1.64 [95% CI, 1.19-2.24; P = .002]; for women, PHR, 2.13 [95% CI, 1.41-3.21; P < .001]).
IN PRACTICE:
"Our analysis found distinctly more significant association between alcohol consumption and dementia risk among women drinkers…[but] suggested that alcohol's impact on dementia results may be more evident in women, who typically had lower rates of other risk factors," the authors wrote. Nevertheless, "our findings suggested that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption for dementia."
SOURCE:
The study was conducted by Lingling Zheng, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Guangdong, China, and appeared online in eClinical Medicine.
LIMITATIONS:
Limitations included potential biases due to confounders and reverse causality, self-reported alcohol consumption, missing confounders (eg, change in alcohol consumption over time), misclassification errors, and limited generalisability.
DISCLOSURES:
The study was partially supported by a Shenzhen Science and Technology Program grant and Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The authors had no financial disclosures of interest.
Note: This article originally appeared on Medscape.
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