Women Who Drink Have Better Cognition

While it would be a stretch–OK a complete lie– to say drinking makes women smarter, at least one  study has found that women who have a drink or two a day scored about 20 percent higher on the Mini
Mental State Exam (MMSE) than women who didn’t drink at all or who
consumed less than one drink a week. The Mini Mental State Exam is used to test impairment, not intelligence, and the results of the recent study, part of a larger ongoing study of 3,298 stroke-free residents of Northern Manhattan, suggest that alcohol may prevent impairment–not make people smarter. Researchers say more research is needed to determine how, exactly, alcohol might act as a protective agent. They also say more men are needed to learn if the effects of alcohol are similar on the rest of us; The recent study lacked a sufficient number of non-drinking men to deliver results that would be statistically significant. Read more in Science Daily.