This doesn’t mean that it is advisable for individuals to take up drinking as a means of lowering their cardiovascular risk. There are other, safer and more effective ways, such as being more physically active, maintaining a healthy diet and stopping smoking.
- Steven Bell
The finding that moderate drinking is not universally associated with a lower risk of all cardiovascular conditions suggests a more nuanced approach to the role of alcohol in prevention of cardiovascular disease is necessary, say the researchers.
Moderate drinking is thought to be associated with a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease compared with abstinence or heavy drinking.
In the UK, moderate drinking is defined as no more than 14 units of alcohol a week, the equivalent of 7 pints of ordinary strength beer or just over one and a half bottles of ordinary strength wine.
There is, however, a growing scepticism around this observation, with some experts pointing out several shortcomings in the evidence, for example grouping non-drinkers with former drinkers, who may have stopped drinking due to poor health.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge and University College London set out to investigate the association between alcohol consumption and 12 cardiovascular diseases by analysing electronic health records for 1.93 million healthy UK adults as part of the CALIBER (ClinicAl research using LInked Bespoke studies and Electronic health Records) data resource.
All participants were free from cardiovascular disease at the start of the study, and non-drinkers were separated from former and occasional drinkers to provide additional clarity in this debate.
The researchers looked at the effect of different levels of drinking on the risk of ‘first presenting’ to a doctor with a number of cardiovascular diseases; for example, did moderate drinking make it more or less likely that an individual’s first diagnosis of cardiovascular disease was a heart attack.
After several influential factors were accounted for, moderate drinking was associated with a lower risk of several, but not all, cardiovascular conditions, including angina, heart failure and ischaemic stroke (the most common type of stroke, when a blood clot blocks the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain), compared with abstaining from alcohol.
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Image: Beer Actor
Credit: Alan Levine
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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