Alcohol, nicotine and dementia

The Lancet recently published a study looking at the risk factors for dementia. Based on observational epidemiology it included excessive alcohol consumption as a risk factor, but when it came to the protective effect of moderate drinking, observational epidemiology was suddenly not enough. We have been here before, of course, and I have written about this for The Critic...

 

They have no such quibbles about evidence that suggests heavy drinking causes dementia, of course. That evidence is actually much flakier — the aforementioned meta-analysis found “no consistent evidence to suggest that the amount of alcohol consumed in later life is associated with dementia risk” — but the Lancet authors conclude that drinking more than 21 units a week is a risk factor for dementia based on a study which found that people who drink until they pass out are twice as likely to suffer from dementia than moderate drinkers!

Heavy drinking probably does cause dementia, although you’d have to drink a lot more than 21 units a week, but the refusal to acknowledge that teetotallers are greater risk than most drinkers is pig-headed. Doctors are never going to recommend that non-drinkers start drinking. A medical journal that portrayed alcohol as in any way beneficial would be considered ideologically unsound in the current year. And so we are left with a soft Lysenkoism in which objective facts must be denied for the greater good. 

The same is even more true of nicotine, which is not mentioned at all in the Lancet study. The authors are keen to stress that epidemiological studies show that smokers are at greater risk of dementia (and, therefore, that smoking must cause dementia), but there is substantial evidence that nicotine confers all sorts of cognitive benefits that could be harnessed to tackle the disease. Research is occasionally commissioned to investigate this further, but there has been a distinct lack of urgency and any positive findings would be resisted by anti-vaping activists who portray nicotine as a “brain poison”.

 

Read it all.