Toast Your Health - Alcohol Helps Heart

Drinking alcohol three or four days a week is not harmful for the heart; on the contrary, it helps lower the risk of heart attack, a new study shows.

Scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, had as starting point the fact that the association between drinking frequency or quantity and the risk of cardiovascular problems had not been studied in women. Nor was the degree to which certain risk factors mediate the relationship between drinking and heart attack risk known - in men as well as in women.

Records of 32,826 women and 18,225 men were studied. The women had been enrolled in the Nurses Health Study and followed up between1990 and 1998, while the men under study had been enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and followed up from 1994 to 2000. From the initial cohort, 249 women and 266 men were matched on age, date of entry and smoking habit, to a control group of 498 female participants and 532 male participants.

The research team, led by Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, analyzed the risk of heart attack related to frequency and quantity of alcohol consumption, as well as the change in risk before and after adjustment for what is known as cardiovascular risk factors. They reached the conclusion that drinking frequency tended to be associated with a lower risk of heart attack in both men and women. The lowest risks were recorded among those who consumed alcohol 3 to 7 days a week.

After further adjustments for levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c and fibrinogen, the association of frequent drinking with risk among women was 75% attenuated, while among men, it was fully attenuated.

"Alcohol intake at least 3 to 4 days per week is associated with a lower risk of myocardial infarction among women and men, an association apparently attributable to the relationship of alcohol with HDL cholesterol, fibrinogen, and hemoglobin A1c", researchers say. Since the effects of alcohol on HDL cholesterol, fibrinogen, and insulin sensitivity had been proved by previous randomized trials, researchers safely concluded that there is a causal inverse relation between alcohol consumption and heart attack.

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