Many people have a cocktail before dinner or a drink to help them wind down at the end of the day. No big deal, right? According to a new observational study, that alcohol consumption might be changing your brain.
Anya Topiwala, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England, and her study co-authors linked moderate drinking — about four standard drinks a week in the United States — to higher brain iron levels in multiple basal ganglia regions.
The researcher analyzed 21,000 people in the U.K. Biobank cohort and found that more brain iron was "associated with poorer scores on tests of executive function, fluid intelligence, and reaction speed," the researchers reported in PLoS Medicine.
