The study appears to say alcohol consumption has protective effect on cognition. Those who drank had less cognitive decline compared to those who abstained completely. If this is correct, this directly contradicts the other studies that says alcohol has zero benefits?
A lot of studies that don't control for confounding factors like the fact that many people who 100% abstain from alcohol are former alcoholics show benefits to small amounts of alcohol consumption compared to no alcohol consumption.
However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors.
This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.
