RESEARCH ON ALCOHOL AND ANGINA AND HEART DISEASE

Apr
02
2009

RESEARCH ON ALCOHOL AND ANGINA AND HEART DISEASE

That guidance may be based not just on the work of Professor Williams and Dr. Beevers, but also on the most recent results of the many studies of the possible links between alcohol and heart disease. Unfortunately, the results are far from clear, and many different conclusions have been drawn from them.

Probably the most reliable conclusions were drawn by Professor A. G. Shaper, of the British Regional Heart Study mentioned in the introduction/in 1994. This showed that moderate drinkers (sixteen to forty-two units a week) suffered 34 percent fewer deaths from heart attack, and 13 percent fewer deaths from other circulation disorders (mainly stroke) than nondrinkers.

This would seem to be encouraging for drinkers, but Professor Shaper stressed that it was not. First, the actual overall numbers of such deaths were so small that the differences could not be considered as reliable or statistically significant. Worse, there was no reduction in overall death rate among the moderate drinkers, so that they were more likely to die from other diseases at the same time.

Professor Shaper showed that the extra heart deaths among the teetotalers included several in people who had been diagnosed as having heart disease when they entered the study. They may well have been drinkers who had turned teetotal because they were already feeling ill, and this could account for the difference in death rates. He concluded that if moderate drinking does protect against heart attacks, the effect is relatively small, and is not accompanied by a reduction in deaths from all types of circulation disorders, or by a reduction in deaths over all.

He compared his results with those of studies in other countries. In Trinidad, the lowest mortality for all causes was in men labeled as abstemious, who did not usually drink, and had no history of drinking problems. In the large Kaiser Permanente Study, which used lifelong abstainers as a comparison, none of the drinking groups— ranging from occasional, through mild, moderate, and heavy—showed any benefit from their alcohol consumption, and those drinking more than six units a day were decidedly worse off.

In a study carried out by the American Cancer Society, in the data on deaths from all causes, only occasional drinkers and those taking one or two drinks a day had a significantly lower risk than nondrinkers. Here, too, the figures may be distorted by some people who gave up drinking because they were already unwell before they entered the study. Above the lowest alcohol intake level, death rates rose progressively with each step up in alcohol consumption.

In this same study, at the level of alcohol intake associated with the lowest risk of coronary heart disease death (four drinks per day), there was an increased risk for all-cause deaths, particularly from accidents and violence, cancer and stroke, which more than outweighed the apparent savings in heart deaths. This bleak statistic does not take into account the increased rates of illness that may stem from consuming much lower amounts of alcohol than four drinks a day.