Alcohol, Aging, and Cognitive Performance in a Cohort of Japanese Americans Aged 65 and Older: The Kame Project

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effects of light to moderate alcohol consumption on cognitive performance. Design and Setting: A cross-sectional analysis including older Japanese Americans in King County, WA, enrolled in the Kame Project, a population-based study of cognition, dementia, and aging. Participants: 1,836 cognitively intact participants aged 65 and older who participated in the baseline (1992-1994) examination. Measurement: Cognitive performance was measured using the Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument, reaction time (simple and choice), and a measure of vocabulary (North American Adult Reading Test). Results: Multivariate analyses were used to examine the relationship between cognitive performance and alcohol consumption at baseline with men and women together and then separately controlling for age, education, smoking, history of stroke, angina, hypertension, diabetes, and coronary heart disease. Findings showed lower cognitive test scores were observed for men who were either abstainers or in the heavy drinking group. For women, a linear relationship between alcohol consumption and cognitive performance was seen on two of the four measures of cognitive functioning. No significant difference in the association of drinking and cognitive function was identified within the different Japanese American subgroups. Conclusion: Results suggest a possible positive relationship between light to moderate drinking and cognitive performance in an aging Japanese American population. Additional long-term prospective and cross-cultural studies are needed to determine the generalizability of these findings to other aging cohorts.

Association between Alcohol Intake and Domain-Specific Cognitive Function in Older Women

“…The Whitehall II Study of middle-aged 1,761 women and 4,272 men found that moderate alcohol intake, compared to light intake, was associated with less risk for poorer overall cognition [6] . Others [1][2][3]28] , but not all [29] , have reported concordant results.…”

The association between different cognitive domains and age in a multi‐centre study of middle‐aged and older European men

“…For example, higher educational levels (Farmer et al, 1994;Lyketsos et al, 1999;Wight et al, 2002) and moderate alcohol consumption (Bond et al, 2001;Britton et al, 2004) have been previously shown to predict improved cognitive performance, whilst depressive symptomology (Wilson et al, 2002;Wilson et al, 2004), co-morbidities (Fillit et al, 2002;Rosano et al, 2005) and smoking (Kalmijn et al, 2002;Reitz et al, 2005) are associated with poorer cognitive performance. Although our choice of predictors was based largely upon the existent literature, we cannot exclude the possibility that some of our findings may be due to unmeasured factors and/ or residual confounding.…”

Alcohol Exposure and Cognitive Development: An Example of Why We Need a Contextualized, Dynamic Life Course Approach to Cognitive Ageing – A Mini-Review

“…Several studies have now reported that alcohol abstainers have lower scores on cognitive tests compared with moderate drinkers [31,[39][40][41][42] . This effect has occurred on measures of a range of cognitive abilities including processing speed, memory, verbal ability, visuospatial ability and reasoning, in samples of young [34,43] , middle [39] and older adults [42] , and across gender.…”