Moderate alcohol drinking seems to be positively associated with brain damage, through increase in iron overload, or brain shrinkage. I can’t figure out how these potential effects actually translate in everyday life brain’s function. Is it significant enough to be noticeable?

All of these studies are observational and only find associations and not causalities. Their conclusions are all filled with words as like: ‘may’, ‘is associated’…

What i mean by ‘noticeable’ in my title, is, are these effects that are associated with moderate alcohol significant enough to hinder everyday life brain function? As in learning new skills, a new language, write code, have spontaneous and fluid speech, etc? It seems as if the effects are really negligable. Maybe they get significant past a certain age.

Reading some comments on the studies, for example the one about brain shrinkage, they found out that moderate drinkers had a brain 1% smaller than abstainers, will 1% over a lifetime make any difference really? We don’t even know if brain size necessarly means better cognitive performance.

Let’s get empirical here, when i check data about countries ranked by Alzheimers and Dementia deaths, there doesn’t seem to be any clear association between countries that have a prominent alcohol culture and the ones that don’t, Qatar, Bahrain are ranked way on top of France for example. So to me there is conflicting evidences.

I know that there are many other factors involved in brain decay, way more important than moderate drinking, like study degrees, how much a person keeps challenging her brain in everyday life, social status. But apparently these studies controlled for these factors.

My question is basically, given the associations found by those studies, is it really worth it for someone that enjoys alcohol to completely quit? Are these associations significant enough? I don’t know how to interpret them.