Alcohol abuse after age 40 has been called a symptom of neurodegenerative diseases
The authors of a new study advise people who suddenly become addicted to alcohol in later life to see a neurologist and get checked for neurodegenerative diseases.
A study by researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), the Brain Health Institute and the Center for Memory and Aging at the University of California at San Francisco (USA), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York found that the presence of neurological disease, especially frontal temporal dementia, can affect the risk of alcohol abuse in patients over 40 years old. The findings are published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Alcohol abuse in the U.S. is generally defined as more than four drinks (a bottle of beer or a glass of wine) per day or 14 drinks per week for men, and three drinks per day or more than seven drinks per week for women. In this case, alcohol begins to negatively affect a person's life, his or her relationships with others, leads to difficulties at work and often to problems with the law. Experts estimate that in the United States, 1.7 percent of the mature population is prone to alcohol abuse.
The authors of many previous studies have concluded that excessive lifetime alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing dementia. But it was not known whether adults who acquired cravings for alcohol late in life had any of the neurodegenerative diseases (characterized by slowly progressive death of certain groups of nerve cells while gradually increasing atrophy of the corresponding parts of the brain and/or spinal cord).
The new cross-sectional retrospective study analyzed data from 1,518 patients collected between 1999 and 2017: these people were diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia (affecting mainly the frontal lobes and anterior temporal lobes of the brain), or senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type (known as Alzheimer's disease), or primary progressive aphasia (leads to loss of speech functions in the absence of cognitive impairment). The propensity to abuse alcohol was tested by questionnaire.
It was found that 2.2 percent of the participants were addicted to alcohol after the age of 40. "Alcohol abuse later in life was significantly more common in patients with a clinical diagnosis of the behavioral variant of frontal temporal dementia than in people with Alzheimer's disease (7.5 percent (13 of 173) versus 1.3 percent (16 of 1254), respectively)," the researchers wrote. People with primary progressive aphasia experienced excessive cravings for alcohol after age 40 in 4.4 percent of cases.
No difference was found between the frequency of alcohol use across the lifespan, if including before age 40, in the three groups. Overall, alcohol abuse was a sign of neurodegenerative disease for 1.4 percent of patients - usually starting within the first three years of the first symptoms of the disease.
Because people who start drinking late in life are usually first seen by psychiatrists and health care professionals, professionals need to be aware that there may be a neurodegenerative disease at the "root" of this harmful and suddenly formed habit, the researchers said. "Specialized assessment, including frontal lobe testing, should be performed and at-risk groups should be sent to a neurologist. Early and correct diagnosis is paramount for the best treatment," the researchers added.
According to the authors of the paper, their findings pointed not only to a particular propensity to drink after the age of 40 in frontal temporal dementia sufferers, but also to a possible difference in the biological mechanisms that underlie the abuse of alcohol specifically late in life or throughout life.