FOOD

E-mail this story

Regular beer drinkers actually had a higher risk of developing dementia, the researchers reported in a study that adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that wine contains healthful compounds.

The results, published in Tuesday's issue of the journal Neurology, showed people who drank up to 21 glasses of wine a week had a measurably lower risk of dementia.

"Monthly and weekly intake of wine is associated with a lower risk of dementia," the team at the Institute of Preventive Medicine at Kommunehospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark, wrote in their report.

People who had just a glass of wine a day had a lower risk of dementia than people who drank no wine at all, they added. While men tended to drink more than women, there were no differences in the health consequences of drinking between men and women.

"These results don't mean that people should start drinking wine or drink more wine than they usually do," Dr. Thomas Truelsen, who led the study, said in a statement.

"But the results are exciting because they could mean that substances in wine reduce the occurrence of dementia. If that's the case, we could potentially develop treatments or prevention methods based on these substances."

The study included 1,700 people who had been taking part in a larger study of heart disease, and had been interviewed in the 1970s about their eating and drinking habits.

Starting 15 years later, they were checked for dementia. Of the participants, 83 developed dementia and their drinking histories were compared the 1,600 other volunteers.

Glass of wine beats bottle of beer

"A drink was defined as one beverage containing 9 grams to 13 grams of alcohol and being equivalent to one bottle of beer, one glass of wine or one measure of spirits," they wrote.

They broke the participants into groups who drank nothing at all, those who had one to seven drinks a week, eight to 14 a week, 15 to 21 drinks a week and 22 or more.

There was a lot of overlap -- people often drank wine as well as beer, for instance. But Truelsen's team found the clearest association was with drinking wine. People who reported a drink or two a month of spirits also had a lower risk of dementia.

There could be several reasons, they said. "Previous studies from a large Danish cohort have shown that wine drinkers have a healthier diet than people drinking beer or spirits," they wrote.

"They had a higher intake of fruit, fish, vegetables and salad, and tended not to use fats on bread and used olive oil for cooking more frequently."

But Truelsen believes that antioxidants -- compounds that can help prevent damage to cells -- may be responsible. Wine, especially red wine, is high in antioxidants such as flavonoids.

"We have no satisfactory explanation for the increased risk of dementia associated with beer," the researchers added. But they noted that beer drinkers sometimes have deficiencies in B vitamins critical for brain and nerve function.

Dr. John Brust, a neurologist at Harlem Hospital Center in New York, said in a commentary that more study is needed -- especially of the association between wine drinking and diet.

"There is also evidence that dietary vitamin E may reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's. These factors were not accounted for in this study," Brust said in a statement.

"Nonetheless, this is a provocative report providing evidence that there is indeed something specifically beneficial about wine."