Study: Drinking Alcohol Can Make Your Brain Shrink

Put away the booze, or get the blues. Or perhaps even forget how to spell "the blues.”

That seems to be the message of a recent study, which concluded that having just one or two alcoholic drinks a day can make your brain shrink. No, really.

A perfect pint of Guinness on the table outside a pub in Dublin city center./Getty Images

"The peer-reviewed paper, published Friday in Nature, found 'negative associations' between alcohol consumption and brain size," the New York Post relayed.

And that is based on just a drink or two. More alcohol, per the study, would mean an even smaller brain. Keep in mind, we're not referring to brain power here. We're referring to the actual size of your brain.

Getty Images

This was no small-sized study, either. "The authors looked at 36,678 brain scans of 'generally healthy middle-aged and older adults' stored by the UK Biobank," the Post wrote.

In a nutshell, heavier alcohol consumption "has been associated with brain atrophy, neuronal loss, and poorer white matter fiber integrity," the study found.

So, bottoms up? Yeah, have at it, pea brain.