Heavy Drinking Linked to Healthy Hearts
May 29, 2006
The more women drink — and the more often men drink — the healthier their hearts.
The new findings, based on the self-reported drinking habits of some 57,000 middle-aged Danes, confirm a previous report that the lower risk of heart disease in men who drink alcohol depends more on how often they drink than on how much they drink.
And for the first time, the study finds that alcohol’s heart benefit for women doesn’t depend on how often they drink — just on how much.
Study co-leader Janne Tolstrup, PhD, is a human biologist in the Center for Alcohol Research at Denmark’s National Institute for Public Health, Copenhagen.
"For men who drink alcohol, the most healthy way they can do that is to drink frequently, but only in small amounts," Tolstrup tells WebMD.
"To get the beneficial effect, you don’t have to drink very much."
"What we see with women is a beneficial effect on heart disease, but this seems associated more with amount than with frequency," Tolstrup says.
"This is a different message than for men, because the women drinking the most have the lowest risk of heart disease.
It seems to be independent of how often they drink."
"What also should be remembered is, here we study heart disease and see a beneficial effect for alcohol drinking," Tolstrup says.
"But alcohol has a lot of disadvantageous effects on other diseases, such as breast cancer.
There are other health outcomes where drinkers’ risk will be increased."
Moreover, the heart benefits of drinking apply only to middle-aged or older people.
"If we had studied young people, we would not see this beneficial effect of drinking — just the detrimental effect," Tolstrup says.
"This is because people in their 20s and 30s are not at risk of heart disease yet.
So this drinking benefit is confined to postmenopausal women and men over age 50."
Over nearly six years, men who drank every day cut their risk of heart disease by 41 percent.
Women who drank the most — 14 or more drinks per week — generally had the lowest risk of heart disease: as much as a 73 percent decrease in risk.
For this study, a drink was defined as 12 grams of alcohol.
A 12-ounce bottle of beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled liquor has between 11 and 14 grams of alcohol.
Annie Britton, PhD, worries that people will use the Tolstrup team’s findings to justify their dangerous drinking habits.
"I think you can drink every day and be moderate.
- Source: Fox News, May 26, 2006
