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• Posted September 24, 2025

Any Amount Of Drinking Increases Dementia Risk, Study Says

Drinking any amount of alcohol likely increases a person’s risk of dementia, a new study says.

Even light drinking — once viewed as protective — is unlikely to lower dementia risk, and that risk increases with the quantity of alcohol a person consumes, researchers reported Sept. 23 in the journal BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.

Every additional one to three drinks a week came with a 15% higher dementia risk, according to the study.

The results challenge earlier studies that found a potential protective effect for light drinking against dementia, researchers noted.

“Our study findings support a detrimental effect of all types of alcohol consumption on dementia risk, with no evidence supporting the previously suggested protective effect of moderate drinking,” wrote the research team led by Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 560,000 people participating in two large-scale studies in the U.S. and the U.K. On average, people were tracked for about four years in the U.S. group and 12 years in the U.K. group.

More than 90% of the participants said they drank alcohol, researchers said. Eventually, more than 14,500 developed dementia.

At first, the study results seemed to indicate a protective effect for light drinking.

Compared to people who had fewer than seven drinks a week, there was a 41% higher risk of dementia among both non-drinkers and heavy drinkers who chugged 40 or more drinks a week, researchers found. Alcoholics had a 51% greater risk.

However, when researchers accounted for the participants’ genetic risk for dementia and alcohol consumption, the results changed.

Any level of drinking increased a person's dementia risk once genetics related to alcohol use were considered, with the risk steadily climbing as alcohol consumption grew.

Further, a doubling in the genetic risk for alcohol dependency was linked to a 16% increase in dementia risk, the study found.

“Halving the population prevalence of alcohol use disorder may reduce dementia cases by up to 16%, highlighting alcohol reduction as a potential strategy in dementia prevention policies,” researchers wrote.

What’s more, those who went on to develop dementia typically drank less in the years preceding their diagnosis, researchers said. That suggests that earlier studies suggesting a protective effect had blundered into reverse causation — assuming less drinking protected the brain, when in fact early brain decline led to reduced alcohol consumption.

“The pattern of reduced alcohol use before dementia diagnosis observed in our study underscores the complexity of inferring causality from observational data, especially in aging populations,” researchers wrote.

“Our findings highlight the importance of considering reverse causation and residual confounding in studies of alcohol and dementia, and they suggest that reducing alcohol consumption may be an important strategy for dementia prevention,” the team concluded.

More information

Dementia UK has more on alcohol and dementia.

SOURCES: BMJ, news release, Sept. 23, 2025; BMJ Evidence Based Medicine, Sept. 23, 2025