CU Change Lab

Drinking alone is a risky business

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:56:36 +0000

Drinking alone is a risky business Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 13:56

Clay Bonnyman Evans

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 Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

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

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.”

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

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Cannabinoids are easier on the brain than booze, study finds

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 22:41:17 +0000

Cannabinoids are easier on the brain than booze, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/02/2018 - 15:41

Cay Leytham-Powell

But much remains unknown or unproved, such as whether marijuana has beneficial effects, ̽��Ƶ professor observes

Marijuana may not be as damaging to the brain as previously thought, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder and the CU Change Lab.

The research, which was published in the journal Addiction, examined the brains of more than 1,000 participants of varying ages, and found that long-term alcohol use is much more damaging to the brain than marijuana, contradicting years of research into the effects of marijuana and other cannabinoid products on the brain.

These findings, and other conclusions suggesting the potential public health benefits of marijuana, come amid the recent back-and-forth on federal marijuana policy and the nation’s opioid crisis.

With alcohol, we’ve known it’s bad for the brain for decades. But for cannabis, we know so little."

Yet scientists are still hesitant to say that cannabinoid usage, specifically as it pertains to marijuana and its associated products, is beneficial.

"Particularly with marijuana use, there is still so much that we don't know about how it impacts the brain," said Rachel Thayer, a graduate student in clinical psychology at ̽��Ƶ and the lead author of the study. "Research is still very limited in terms of whether marijuana use is harmful, or beneficial, to the brain."

While the negative effects of alcohol on the brain have been known by researchers for years, it has been assumed that cannabinoids are as damaging to long-term brain health—if not more—given the immediate psychoactive effects of the THC (the chemical that gets a person high) in marijuana.

However, this may not necessarily be true.

"When you look at the research much more closely, you see that a lot of it is probably not accurate," said study co-author Kent Hutchison, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at ̽��Ƶ and co-director of the CU Change Lab, which explores the factors linked with health and risk behavior.

"When you look at these studies going back years, you see that one study will report that marijuana use is related to a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus. The next study then comes around, and they say that marijuana use is related to changes in the cerebellum or the whatever."

"The point is that there’s no consistency across all of these studies in terms of the actual brain structures."

Kent Hutchinson of the CU Change Lab is one of authors of this new research on the effects of Marijuana on the brain. Photograph by Cay Leytham-Powell.

To combat this misconception in the existing literature, the researchers gave a fresh look at some existing neurological imaging data from the MRIs of both adolescents and adults to see how, using the same variables and controls, the influence of cannabinoids on the brain compared to or contrasted with alcohol.

"With alcohol, we’ve known it’s bad for the brain for decades," said Hutchison. "But for cannabis, we know so little."

To see any potential difference, the researchers used the data to examine the most important neurological components: gray matter and white matter.

Gray and white matter are the two main types of tissue that make up the brain and central nervous system. Gray matter is the "stuff"—the cell bodies, dendrites and axon terminals—that enable functionality. White matter, then, is how the grey matter communicates between clusters. Any loss of size or integrity in either can make the brain not work quite like it should.

The study found that alcohol use was significantly associated with a decrease in gray matter size and white matter integrity, particularly for adults who may have decades of exposure. Marijuana and associated cannabinoid products, on the other hand, were not shown to have any long-term impact on the amount of gray matter in the brain or on the integrity of the white matter.

The research demonstrated that, "while marijuana may also have some negative consequences, it definitely is nowhere near the negative consequences of alcohol," according to Hutchison.

Despite marijuana not being as harmful as once thought, and definitely not as damaging as other legal and illegal products, the research has not yet proved any possible benefits. This is particularly the case as it relates to the different products on the market (both THC and non-THC-containing cannabinoid products), their usage with pain and addiction treatment and the effect on different ages — especially as cannabinoid usage is on the rise among older populations.

"Considering how much is happening in the real world with the legalization movement, we still have a lot of work to do," Hutchison said.

MRI Title image by Roger Mommaerts/Flickr