Submission title gets it wrong. What the study found was that of the total variance in the amount of gray matter, only 0.8% of that variance could be explained by alcohol consumption.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
However, the authors think the effect of alcohol is notable because that 0.8% was still larger than any other factor they tested, like smoking.
> Detrimental effects of drinking appear to be greater than other modifiable factors. Current ‘low risk’ drinking guidelines should be revisited to take account of brain effects.
The authors are pretty clear. You are, of course, free to draw your own conclusions.
I.E. you can have a statistically significant but unimportant effect.