Eating Fabulous

Wine Protects Against Dementia

by ruth on April 10th, 2008

In a long-term population study of about 1,500 Swedish women, researchers found out further evidence that there is a something in wine that protects then from suffering from dementia.

The findings are based on 1,458 women who were included in the so-called 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. The results show 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 had reported that they regularly drank beer or liquor.

“The group that had the lowest proportion of dementia were those who had reported that the only alcohol they drank was wine,” says Professor Lauren Lissner, who directs the study in collaboration with Professor Ingmar Skoog, both with the Sahgrenska Academy.

Considering other laboratory studies made on the correlation between wine consumption and dementia, aging, and other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, I would suspect the antioxidant compounds such as resveratrol would be responsible for these observations.

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POSTED IN: Healthy Beverages, ~Healthy Aging, ~Mental Health