It seems like every day produces a new study that talks about alcohol and how it affects health. One study says that moderate amounts of alcohol is great for averting cardiovascular disease, while another says that its consumption can lead to breast cancer among women – the risk increasing with each and every drink.

So apparently, while alcohol may be beneficial to one aspect of our health, it’s detrimental to our health in another aspect? Talk about frustrating! This latest study only fuels that frustration.

Researchers from Wellesley College analyzed medical data from 1,800 people over the age of 60, all of whom were given a full medical exam and an MRI between the years of 1999 and 2001. The medical exam got information like the participants’ height, weight, body mass index, and in the course of the exam they were asked about how many alcoholic beverages they consumed in the average week.

Based on the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results and the accompanying data, the researchers’ conclusions are about as straightforward as they come: the more the participants’ drank, the smaller their brain size, or brain volume.

Writing in the journal Archives of Neurology, where the study is published, “The public health effect of this study gives a clear message about the possible dangers of drinking alcohol.”

They go on to write that while alcohol seems to have a positive effect on cardiovascular health, it does not possess similar benefits with regards to preserving brain volume.

As I’ve written in the past, the brain shrinks with age. With brain shrinkage comes diminished brain capacity (as my article “Fighting Shrinkage” talks about). The brain shrinks about 2 percent with each passing decade and, according to the study, alcohol consumption expedites that shrinkage.

So what is one to do? To drink or not to drink? Given the fact that the researchers want to perform more tests before saying definitively that alcohol consumption expedites brain shrinkage, combined with the evidence that moderate alcohol consumption improves cardiovascular health, I don’t see harm in consuming moderate amounts of alcohol (no more than one drink of wine per day). Granted, this is an interesting finding and certainly grounds for further research. But because there was no significant difference in brain volume when the researchers compared the brain sizes of drinkers and non-drinkers – about 1.5 percent difference in brain size – the research is not compelling enough for me to give a cease and desist order with regards to consuming alcohol.