Alcohol – the new heart medicine

“A drink a day keeps heart disease away.” This could potentially be the new mantra for men who wish to avoid developing heart disease later in life. According to a new research men who enjoy a daily drink are much less likely to develop heart disease in the long run.

Danish researchers studied the drinking habits of over 28,000 women and 25,000 plus men aged 50-65 years over a period of nearly 6 years to arrive at this conclusion. They found that daily intake of alcohol gave men an astonishing 41% advantage in avoiding heart disease risk. Surprisingly, the same could not be said for women.

In stark contrast were men who consumed alcohol just once a week – their chances of cutting out heart disease increased by just seven percent. The effective suggestion of this is that, as long as drinking is done daily, no matter how much, the heart will remain healthy.

On the other hand, women were none the better off whether they drank daily or once a week. No doubt the alcohol helped reduce risk of heart disease, but the risk reduction was respectively 36% and 35% only.

The study clearly indicates it is the drinking frequency rather than the amount of alcohol consumption that is the determining factor for reduction in risk. Professor Morten Gronbaek of the Centre for Alcohol Research, Copenhagen, said, “Among women alcohol intake may be the primary determinant of the inverse association between drinking alcohol and risk of coronary heart disease whereas among men, drinking frequency, not alcohol intake, seems more important.”

The researchers also stressed upon the fact that the harmful effects of heavy alcohol consumption far outweighed the benefit it provided for coronary heart disease and exhorted medical practitioners to take care in this context when giving health advice to patients.

Professor Gronbaek added, “Heavy alcohol drinking is positively associated with many problems such as liver diseases, cancers, and road crashes; and overall mortality is higher among individuals with a high alcohol intake compared with light consumers.”

“Also, the beneficial effect of alcohol is probably confined to middle aged or older people. Therefore the inverse association between alcohol intake and coronary heart disease should be viewed in this context when giving public health advice,” he concluded.

Earlier research has already shown that moderate drinking is good for the heart, but most of these studies were on men, with little or no knowledge gathered about the drinking patterns or heart disease risk among women.

Epidemiologist Dr Annie Britton, a senior lecturer at University College London warned the Danish participants were middle aged and so presumably at a greater risk of heart disease, the low response rate also meant extremes of drinking may not have been captured and finally, the nature of this report, an observational study, may make it prone to other explanations for the findings.

Related Discussions Laughter : The best medicine for your heart Ukrainian medicine may cause dizziness and visual disturbances. Do you actually think about your heart?

Related Articles Alcohol Thins Blood Alcohol + Exercise Improves Heart Health Moderate Alcohol Good for Feminine Hearts