Light drinking good for heart

One or two alcoholic drinks a day can help healthy people-and heart patients-live longer but heavy or binge drinking can have adverse health outcomes.

There is considerable evidence that moderate drinking helps reduce the risk of heart disease and death from heart-related causes, likely due to the fact that drinking alcohol is linked to higher levels of good cholesterol. However, questions have been raised about how research on alcohol and health is done.

To address these issues, researchers looked at nine years' worth of data from the American National Health Interview Survey from 1987 to 2000, including 245,207 Americans. Census bureau employees perform the survey in person every year, sampling a representative group of around 20,000 to 40,000 US citizens. The researchers correlated the information on alcohol consumption with data from the National Death Index up until 2002, identifying 10,670 deaths from cardiovascular causes among survey participants.

It was found that the risk of dying due to heart disease or stroke was about the same for people who had never drank, meaning they had less than 12 drinks in their lifetime; people who drank infrequently, meaning they had more than 12 drinks in their life, but never drank more than 12 drinks in a given year; and ex-drinkers, who had more than 12 drinks in their lives and had consumed more than 12 drinks per year in the past. But for light drinkers, defined as men or women who had three drinks a week or less, risk was 31 percent lower than for non-drinkers.

Among moderate drinkers (women who had three to seven drinks each week and men who had three to 14 drinks a week), risk was 38 percent lower than it was for abstainers.  Heavy drinkers i.e. women who had more than seven drinks a week and men who downed more than 14 drinks weekly, had the same cardiovascular death risk as non-drinkers. It was also found that people who had two drinks on days when they consumed alcohol were consistently at a lower risk of heart disease or stroke than people who had three or more drinks per drinking day.

The study's strengths included its size, the fact that it included a broad sample of the US population, and its ability to separate people who had never drank or only rarely drank from those who had drank previously but quit. The results reconfirm the lower risk linked to moderate drinking.