A spot of vino may protect against dementia for women

By Jayne Warren - 30/04/2008

I imagine wine expert Oz Clarke (along with Threshers!) will be thrilled with a piece of research from Sweden which shows that there may be constituents in wine that protect women against dementia. Curiously it doesn't apply to women who drink beer or spirits - and the findings cannot be generalised for men.

 

The research was based on 1,458 women who were included in the Population Study of Women from 1968. When they were examined by physicians they were asked to report how often they drank wine, beer, and liquor by selecting from seven categories on a scale from ‘never’ to ‘daily.’

 

The researchers know nothing about how much they drank on each occasion, or how correct the estimates were. For each beverage the women reported having drunk more than once a month, they were classified as a consumer of that particular beverage.

 

Thirty-four years after the first study, 162 women had been diagnosed with dementia. And the results showed  that among those women who reported that they drank wine, a considerably lower proportion suffered from dementia, whereas this correlation was not found among those who regularly drank beer or liquor.

 

Professor Lauren Lissner from the Sahgrenska Academy, said: “The group that had the lowest proportion of dementia were those who had reported that the only alcohol they drank was wine.

 

“We have to be very cautious when we interpret these results, since we can’t see in this type of population study what is cause and what is effect. There may be other factors in women who drink wine that provide them with protection against dementia, factors that we can’t measure. But the correlation found is a strong one and can’t be explained by other factors that we can measure, such as education, BMI, and smoking."

 

Not surprisingly the researchers are reluctant to make any recommendations regarding whether a woman should begin to drink wine, continue to drink wine, or increase their consumption. However, today’s women drink more wine and liquor, but less beer, than earlier generations did. The study shows, for example, that fewer than 20 percent of middle-aged women drank wine every week in the late 1960s, yet today more than half of all women of that age report that they drink wine every week. 

 

I'll drink to that...