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Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#111

Post by DanBC »

prodmerc wrote: post #93
hellofunk wrote: post #68

I guess you need to decide what is important to you. For example, a few years ago, this was published [0]: > One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink tend to die sooner than those who do http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2017200...

Well, that makes sense. It reduces stress for a while and postpones suicides.

Alcohol drastically increases suicide rates and self harm rates.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jayne_Cooper/publicatio...

> Conclusions: The results highlight the importance in a suicide prevention strategy of early intervention after an episode of self-harm. Treatment should include attention to physical illness, alcohol problems, and living circumstances. Self-harm appears to confer a particularly high risk of suicide in female patients.

http://research.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centrefor...

> 11. Over half the patients who died by suicide had a history of alcohol or drug misuse. There were national differences, with alcohol misuse a more common antecedent of suicide in Scotland and Northern Ireland, drug misuse more common in Scotland. However, a much smaller group was in contact with specialist substance misuse services

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#112

Post by JamesBarney »

Cyph0n wrote: post #84

I'm always interested to see how people react to a news article or study that criticizes alcohol. I have noticed over time that alcohol consumption is usually a taboo subject to discuss for some reason, and almost everyone I talk to immediately gets on the defensive when I say that I don't drink and never will. Can anyone shed some light on why exactly people don't like it when someone doesn't drink, especially when…

This happens with any large lifestyle choices. If you bring up a study about having kids or religion increases or decreases your risk of depression or life fulfilment you'll see the same thing.

People feel passionately about life choices they've made.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#113

Post by Symbiote »

novia wrote: post #45
jogjayr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says a 12 oz beer (slightly larger than the standard 330ml beer) is 1 drink for the purposes of the study.

According to the study which was linked in another comment [1] they were using the standard defined in [2]. This site shows that one pint of lager counts as 2 units of alcohol. One pint is 19.2 oz [3]. A bottle of beer is usually 12 oz, aka 5/8 of a pint, aka 1.25 units of alcohol. I trust the source over the science journalist. [1] http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2353 [2] https://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/unit-c…

One British pint is 568mL, and one "unit" of alcohol is 10mL -- I think the latter might be a European standard.

That makes a ½pt (284mL) beer, at 3.5%, almost exactly 10mL of alcohol (284*0.035 = 9.94).

The average beer is stronger than it was 20 years ago, but there's still a feeling that 1pt = 2 units in Britain.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#114

Post by SubiculumCode »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #96
marmaduke wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software would you suggest for subcortical reconstruction then? What do you think of FreeSurfer v6's?

I have some experience with FreeSurfer. As a whole, FreeSurfer is pretty terrible at hippocampal/subcortical segmentation, but very good at cortical surface reconstruction. One of the links I posted in grandparent presents a validation experiment on Hongzhi Wang's method employing Adaboost learning to vastly improve FreeSurfer segmentations. It is impressive and useful for researchers used to FreeSurfer. However, the…

A large problem of earlier versions of FreeSurfer v. For hippocampal segmentation, many regions contain intersections between three tissue types (white matter, gray matter, and CSF). This complicates tissue classification of images with large voxels, because a voxel will be an average of multiple tissue types. FreeSurfer version 6 has options to use the native resolution of your structural images, so this might improve things some. I have yet to try it out. However, it will still use a single probability atlas, which tends to have lower performance than the multi-atlas methods.

I should emphasize that FreeSurfer is great for what it does great: Surface reconstruction.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#115

Post by JamesBarney »

gozur88 wrote: post #100
hellofunk wrote: post #68

I guess you need to decide what is important to you. For example, a few years ago, this was published [0]: > One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink tend to die sooner than those who do http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2017200...

It's a safer bet that healthy people are more likely to be moderate drinkers than it is to assume moderate drinking will extend your life.

Why is that a safer bet when randomized control trials with animals finds the same thing?

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#116

Post by nickledave »

Haven't seen anyone else comment on this specific statement from the abstract: "No association was found with cross sectional cognitive performance or longitudinal changes in semantic fluency or word recall." Based on other people's comments, seems like the main finding here is that maybe the hippocampus shrinks as we get older and maybe there's an effect on lexical fluency. We already know that, even in "healthy" subjects, the brain shrinks due to aging, and I think no-one can say yet how much atrophy can take place before it impacts memory or learning.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#117

Post by Cyph0n »

JamesBarney wrote: post #112
Cyph0n wrote: post #84

I'm always interested to see how people react to a news article or study that criticizes alcohol. I have noticed over time that alcohol consumption is usually a taboo subject to discuss for some reason, and almost everyone I talk to immediately gets on the defensive when I say that I don't drink and never will. Can anyone shed some light on why exactly people don't like it when someone doesn't drink, especially when…

This happens with any large lifestyle choices. If you bring up a study about having kids or religion increases or decreases your risk of depression or life fulfilment you'll see the same thing. People feel passionately about life choices they've made.

That's a good point actually. I never thought of it that way.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#118

Post by Symbiote »

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 wrote: post #29
nothrabannosir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single shot of hard liquor is explicitly 1 unit. 1 standard serving is 25ml, *40% (standard for whiskey and vodka ) = 10ml = 1 unit. So 14 units is 14 shots. This is not a coincidence. It's why they call it a "unit", and why the standard "single shot size" is 25ml. (The other measurements are fine) Edit: caveat: I'm European. This may be different in the us!

Bear in mind that these things vary by country (i.e. what is a single unit and what is a standard serving). Around here a standard shot of spirits is a single unit, give or take at least, but it is 4 cL in size.

The UK even has two choices: either 25mL or 35mL. The bar must have a sign saying which measure they use, it's usually fairly clear once you know where to look.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#119

Post by hunter2_ »

Cyph0n wrote: post #84

I'm always interested to see how people react to a news article or study that criticizes alcohol. I have noticed over time that alcohol consumption is usually a taboo subject to discuss for some reason, and almost everyone I talk to immediately gets on the defensive when I say that I don't drink and never will. Can anyone shed some light on why exactly people don't like it when someone doesn't drink, especially when…

Similar to the "stupid things" comment, I think it's that people who drink tend to have so much fun doing so, that they extrapolate what you're saying into "I don't like to have fun." Obviously that's not likely to be the case, but the strong association people have between drinking and fun makes them draw that correlation... thinking that they won't have as much fun with you unless you get on the same wavelength. Pretty dumb.

Re: Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

#120

Post by gozur88 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #115
gozur88 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a safer bet that healthy people are more likely to be moderate drinkers than it is to assume moderate drinking will extend your life.

Why is that a safer bet when randomized control trials with animals finds the same thing?

Do they? What studies?
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