For many adults, an evening beer or a glass of wine feels harmless. It marks the end of the day and shows up at almost every celebration, from birthday dinners to backyard barbecues.
Neurologist Richard Restak is urging older drinkers to see that habit differently. In his recent work on memory and dementia, he calls alcohol “a very, very weak neurotoxin” that is “not good for nerve cells” and adds “I strongly suggest that if you are 65 years old or older, that you completely and permanently eliminate alcohol from your diet.”
Why a memory expert focuses on the mid sixties
Restak, a Washington-based neurologist who has spent decades studying how brains age, explains in his books on memory and dementia that everyday choices either protect neurons or slowly wear them down.
In titles like “The Complete Guide to Memory” and “How to Prevent Dementia,” he repeatedly comes back to the idea that brain health in later life is built day by day, not just in the doctor’s office.
He points to studies suggesting that humans may lose only about two to four percent of their neurons over an entire lifetime.
That sounds reassuring. But by the mid sixties the brain is already working with less reserve than it had at forty or fifty, and recovery from any new damage is slower. Restak argues that this is exactly the stage of life when it makes little sense to keep adding a substance that interferes with how brain cells communicate.
He also flags a risk that shows up far beyond brain scans or memory tests. Alcohol affects balance and reaction time, and in older adults it mixes with common medications in unpredictable ways.
Restak notes that deaths from falls have climbed sharply among seniors and cites work showing that falls account for a large share of accidental deaths in people in their seventies.
In everyday terms, that nightcap can turn a slightly wobbly walk to the bathroom into a trip to the emergency room.
What newer research says about alcohol and the aging brain
For years, many headlines suggested that light or moderate drinking could even help brain health. Some early observational studies saw lower dementia rates in people who drank modestly compared with people who reported never drinking at all.
Large recent studies are pushing back on that comfortable story. A major analysis led by researchers at University of Oxford combined health records from more than half a million adults with genetic data from over two million people.
Every time lifetime alcohol intake roughly tripled, dementia risk rose by about fifteen percent, and people with a higher inherited tendency toward alcohol use disorder also had a higher chance of developing dementia.
The genetic work did not find convincing protection at low levels of drinking and suggests that earlier “healthy drinker” findings may have been distorted because some people cut back as their brains began to decline.
Another study, published in the journal Neurology, examined brain tissue from 1,781 people after death and matched the findings to how much they had drunk during life.
Heavy drinkers, defined as eight or more alcoholic drinks per week, were much more likely to have small vessel damage in the brain and tau tangles, microscopic changes linked to memory problems and Alzheimer-type disease.
Former heavy drinkers also showed higher rates of these injuries, and both groups tended to die years earlier than people who drank little or not at all.
Other long-term studies of older adults in Europe and Asia likewise tie regular alcohol use in later life to faster cognitive decline, especially when drinking has continued over many years. Not every analysis lands in exactly the same place, and a few reviews still describe a curve where tiny amounts of alcohol look neutral.
Even so, the weight of more recent research is shifting toward a cautious message that each additional drink probably adds at least some risk for an aging brain.
Think of it this way. Past middle age, the brain starts to look more like a savings account that no longer earns much interest. Alcohol becomes a small but steady fee that chips away at what is left.
What this means for that nightly beer or glass of wine
So where does this leave someone who is 65 or 75 and used to having a drink in the evening. Restak’s own view is blunt. If you are in that age range, especially if you already live with balance issues, muscle weakness, sleep problems, or several daily medications, he believes the safest choice is to stop drinking completely.
Not everyone will take that step at once. In practical terms, many clinicians suggest starting with simple moves, such as counting how many drinks you actually have in a week, scheduling alcohol-free days, choosing non-alcoholic options at some social events, and asking a primary care doctor how alcohol may interact with your medical conditions and prescriptions.
There is also the question many people avoid. Why do I drink? If the honest answer is stress, loneliness, or boredom, then the real work is finding other ways to cope instead of relying on what is in the glass.
For older adults who decide to keep drinking, the emerging science still points in one direction. Less is safer for the brain, and there is growing evidence that there may be no completely risk-free level of alcohol when it comes to dementia.
The study was published in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.
