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

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

#241

Post by prodmerc »

DanBC wrote: post #111
prodmerc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alcoholism (abuse/misuse/problems) increases suicide rates. As does caffeine overconsumption, which makes me want to punch those "caffeinated as fuck" T-shirt wearing (but against cannabis or amphetamines) people in the face.

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

#242

Post by exclusiv »

mothers wrote: post #237
exclusiv wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is this: alcohol is worse than water and alcohol is bad for you. Except if you're at risk of cardiovascular disease as I mentioned. Water cannot save you there. Why can't you agree? You're ignoring every opposing argument in this thread and making false statements like "alcohol has no benefits over water period".

wrong. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/9/827/58224/Water-O...

That doesn't prove I'm wrong. From your study:

> In summary, we report intriguing associations between the intake of fluids and the risk of coronary heart disease that are not obviously explained by confounding. Further research in other populations, possibly including experimental study designs, is necessary to decide whether the associations are causal.

Please also note another study which refutes the 15 year old one you posted and suggests you are wrong:

"In conclusion, this study revealed no statistically significant differences in the prevalence of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, myocardial infarction, and angina pectoris between people drinking or not drinking more water than the daily recommended amount. Even though interest in the effects of water has only recently increased, related studies are still insufficient." [1]

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210909916...

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

#243

Post by exclusiv »

mothers wrote: post #236
exclusiv wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to cite the studies about harm from alcohol. I was disputing your claim that "drinking has no benefits compared to water. period" You're clearly wrong on that.

nope. water also reduces the risk of heart disease [1] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/9/827/58224/Water-O... not to mention alcohol has many negative side effects you're not mentioning. it's a home run in favor of water. again, if it's so good for you, would you give it to a child? no, no you wouldn't. why? because overall you know intuitively it's not good for a child. how about you show me all of the stud…

See my newer study above that refutes your old one.

I'm not refuting the negative side effects of alcohol. I'm disputing your ridiculous claim that alcohol has zero benefits over water.

No you don't give it to a child (illegal, they can't handle the effects, and it's not going to provide health benefits for them). That's silly. I wouldn't let them drive a car either but that doesn't mean a car provides no benefits. Plus, as one of my prior comments you ignored, alcohol can protect against cardiovascular disease for men 60+ and that benefit outweighs any negatives.

Water has no negative side effects? Yes clean water in non-toxic amounts yes that is correct to my knowledge.

However, "The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world." [1]

A prior commenter pointed out how alcohol saved humanity by allowing drinkable water.

Alcohol could actually prevent 3.4 M deaths. It can prevent cardiovascular disease for many people. It provides fun/enjoyment/stress relief in moderation. Those are benefits.

Your claim that it provides zero benefits is ridiculous and incorrect. Alcohol is both a tonic and a poison.

[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-17-voa34-67381152/274...

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

#244

Post by exclusiv »

mothers wrote: post #239
exclusiv wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent asked you to compare it to alcoholic drinks, not compare it with lower intake of itself.

from a given level of hydration you can choose to drink more water or drink alcohol. i've covered one of the scenarios. at best both alcohol and water change your mood. of course as we all know what has a desirable mood change and the other doesn't at high consumption levels.

So you twist it to high consumption levels. What about moderate recreational usage as the parent suggested?

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

#245

Post by marmaduke »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #114
SubiculumCode wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impro…

Thanks for all the details. Are those atlas based methods applicable to standard T1 scans or require extras like T2 or flair? Are there available software implementations or it's all research code?

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

#246

Post by SubiculumCode »

marmaduke wrote: post #245
SubiculumCode wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impro…

Thanks for all the details. Are those atlas based methods applicable to standard T1 scans or require extras like T2 or flair? Are there available software implementations or it's all research code?

the method is quite general and applies to any image type for which an appropriate atlas is available.

It is simple to see why with a straightforward description of Multiatlas methods. Generally two steps are performed: Warping and Voing.

Step 1. Warp. An atlas brain is spatially warped to match the subject's brain using affine, non-linear and diffeomorphic normalization tools (ANTs being one of the strongest contending registration spatial normalization programs). This warp maps the atlas's ROI onto the subject's brain, producing a candidate segmentation. This is done for each atlas, producing N candidate segmentations.

Step 2. Vote. In its simplest form, candidate segmentations vote at each voxel for an ROI label, majority wins.

This produces the finished segmentation.

Advances in image registration and voting methods over the last decade have really made this the preferred method for accurate image registration. Unfortunately, sometimes good multi atlases are lacking. Historically, most published atlases are single atlases with an average or probability estimate at each voxel. There are some mutliatlases available for specific structures (e.g. hippocampus, see MAGeT comments above). I believe there are some multi ROI multi atlases now available. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4691373/

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

#247

Post by lostmsu »

surement wrote: post #238
loeber wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evidently many people drink 'this much' without terrible consequences This assumption reflects an underlying statistical bias: if most people you know exhibit this behavior, then that's what you see as normal. It may very well be the case that the consequences are actually terrible -- they're just hard for you to perceive because they're normalized by everyone exhibiting them.

Then the people who don't drink would be outrageously more successful.

What's the statistics in your case?

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

#248

Post by asciimo »

DanBC wrote: post #209
asciimo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you are not an alcoholic!

People who drink 2 drinks a night are not dependent drinkers either. This study is not about people dependent on alcohol. It's about people who drink at or slightly above the recommended limits (When the study started the limits were 21 drinks a week for men).

Thank you, but my comment wasn't about the study. My comment was a direct response to the parent's opinion about what is considered moderate drinking. An alcoholic would have a much more liberal judgment.

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

#249

Post by wutbrodo »

jasonkester wrote: post #197
wutbrodo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urgh, it's too late to edit it but it should say "scattered across the rest of the evening s ", not all in the same night...

Gotta lay off the scorch.

Damn it haha, I missed that one

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

#250

Post by wutbrodo »

dpark wrote: post #196
wutbrodo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, but the baseline for that _type_ of beer is pretty low so the shittier ones in that part of the market can easily reach 3.5. Many of the fraternities at my (large, public) university would bulk-buy 2.5% beer. This is in contrast to the baseline that the parents claim would imply, in a market supposedly "overwhelmingly" skewed towards stronger craft beer.

And what exactly were these 2.5% beers that your university's fraternities were buying? Can you provide a concrete example of these popular 2.5% beers available in bulk? And where is this university located?

My mistake, I was just curious enough to double-check and it was 3.2% (low-point beer).

When you're supplying drinks for hundreds of random people, the volume starts to be a lot more important than the quality of the beer (or alcohol) itself. Everyone who lived in the frat had their own private stashes of better beer that they and their friends would drink from, and our private parties were better-supplied.

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