Solitary alcohol consumption is connected to poorer cognitive function among older adults, ̽����Ƶ researcher Carillon Skrzynski finds

Studies regarding the potential risks—and benefits—of alcohol use have reached widely differing conclusions, from suggesting that moderate alcohol use may have benefits for health to arguing that any amount of alcohol consumption ultimately puts drinkers’ health at risk.

But researchers seem to agree on at least one thing: Drinking alone is a red flag.��

“Solitary drinking is associated with many different negative consequences and correlates,” says Carillon Skrzynski, an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s��Center for Health and Neuroscience, Genes, and Environment, or CU Change. “It’s a very risky drinking pattern.”��

Carillon Skrzynski, an assistant research professor in the ̽����Ƶ Center for Health and Neuroscience, Genes, and Environment (CU Change), and her research colleagues studied solitary drinking in older adulthood, connecting it to poorer objective and subjective cognitive function.

She should know. She wrote her dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University on solitary alcohol consumption and has published two meta-analyses on the subject.��

But to date, little research has examined solitary drinking specifically among older people. Despite that, Skrzynski says “there is a higher prevalence of drinking alone the older you get.”��

Using a dataset collected to study cannabis and common complaints in older adults compiled by Angela Bryan, professor of psychology and neuroscience and co-director at CU Change, Skrzynski was able to analyze how solitary drinking affects cognitive function.

She and Bryan published the results of the study in the journal .

“Our results expand knowledge of solitary drinking in older adulthood by connecting it to poorer objective and subjective cognitive function,” the authors d.

Skrzynski analyzed 342 individuals aged 60 or older who completed the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test—an objective measure of verbal memory involving word recall—and subjective cognition via the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Cognitive Function questionnaire, on which subjects self-assess their cognitive function.��

The study compared these outcomes among older adults who drank alone, those who drank only socially and those who did not drink alcohol at all, among other aims. (Subjects who engaged in hazardous alcohol use were precluded from the study.)

“Those who drank only socially had better cognitive functioning than both those who drank solitarily and the non-drinking group,” she says. As noted in the paper, this may suggest a potential inverted U-shaped curve wherein both solitary drinking and non-drinking may be associated with poorer cognitive function compared to social-only drinking and therefore signal risk in this domain.

The research did not examine reasons why older adults may choose to consume alcohol alone.��

“That’s a crucial point—what is motivating their behavior? Often people are using (alcohol) to cope with negative emotions,” she says. “The self-medication hypothesis suggests that using substances to heal oneself can be maladaptive.”

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“People drink all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. Not every older person who is drinking alone is doing it in a harmful way. One person may have an occasional glass of wine by themselves with their dinner while another may drink an entire bottle of wine alone every night. These are very different scenarios,” says ̽����Ƶ scientist Carillon Skrzynski. ��

However, she emphasizes that solitary drinking does not necessarily imply that a person is engaged in problematic drinking or has an alcohol use disorder, especially among older adults.��

“People drink all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. Not every older person who is drinking alone is doing it in a harmful way,” she says. “One person may have an occasional glass of wine by themselves with their dinner while another may drink an entire bottle of wine alone every night. These are very different scenarios.”��

But Skrzynski notes that even if moderate social consumption of alcohol may have benefits for cognition, other research suggests any alcohol consumption at all may increase risks for cancer and other diseases.

“It’s a mixed bag,” she says.

Future research on the subject can be refined and expanded, the paper suggests, including examinations of data samples “with varied patterns of alcohol consumption, and cognitive functioning utilizing diverse subjective and objective measures over longer periods of time.”��

��“For example, the Rey (test) is objective, but it only measures one domain of objective cognition, verbal memory,” Skrzynski says. Another avenue of research is polysubstance use, or use of multiple substances, and how that is related to social context and outcomes. “How does co-use of alcohol and cannabis in solitary settings affect people?” Skrzynski wonders.

Overall, she says, solitary drinking seems to be a risky drinking pattern, even for older individuals who may be more likely to engage in it. Thus, further research on this population is necessary to continue to understand and ultimately mitigate any harm of alcohol consumption in this context.

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