Key points from article :
The study found a strong link between alcohol consumption and shorter telomeres.
The research evaluated telomere length in over 245,000 participants from the UK Biobank.
Alcohol may also cause severe age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
They found that alcohol consumption can slow the rate of growth in the developing brains of adolescents and young adults.
Alcohol directly accelerates aging by damaging DNA in the telomere.
“Shortened telomeres have been proposed as risk factors which may cause a number of severe age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease,” said study lead, Dr. Anya Topiwala.
They used a genetic approach called Mendelian Randomisation (MR) to investigate the association between alcohol intake and telomere length.
The study was conducted at Oxford Population Health and published in Molecular Psychiatry.
