Men who consume alcohol protect their heart
December 2009
According to a recent Spanish study, the risk of heart disease reduce greatly in men who regularly consume alcohol, no matter which particular drink.
Women who participated in the study did not benefit. Larraitz Arriola, a researcher at the Public Health Department of Gipuzkoa in San Sebastian, said that her team’s finding confirms what many other studies have already said.
However, study subjects who drank heavily were also able to increase their heart health by drinking, in a way that people who did not drink did not.
Risk of other diseases are increased due to heavy drinking but people in Spain, experience relatively low rates of heart disease, where rates of alcohol consumption are high.
Arriola says that she would not advise anybody to start drinking even though it can be beneficial to the heart, because alcohol causes 1.8 million deaths a year.
In order to have healthy lifestyles those who drink regularly should drink moderately, she added.
Researchers have gathered data for their purpose of study on 41,000 men and women, all of whom made records of their alcohol intake.
All of the subjects had enrolled in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC) study, which comprises about 500,000 adults throughout 10 countries in Western Europe.
Of the initial batch of 41,000 subjects, 15,630 were men and 25,808 were women.
About half of the study subjects were followed for 10 years or more.
The researchers looked for events like heart attacks or chest pains among the study subjects, in their follow-up interviews.
The researchers totally recorded 609 cardiovascular events among the original 41,000 after following-up with them. Out of these 481 of the events were in men, and 128 were in women.
Regular heavy drinking men had risk factors reduced by half while light drinkers risk factors were able to reduce their risk by up to 35% independent of the type of alcohol consumed. Men who drank moderately fared the best as they were able to reduce their risk of heart disease by up to 51%.
Michelle Williams from Artemis Solutions Group who specialise in recruiting for Medical and Pharmaceutical industry comments “I’m sure many men will be delighted with the headline findings of this study and they will no doubt be much discussed in pubs across the country.
