Our study confirms what many other studies have already said," says researcher Larraitz Arriola, MD, of the Public Health Department of Gipuzkoa in San Sebastian, Spain. She suspects it's because of the relatively low number of women in the study who developed heart disease.
That study includes a half million adults living in 10 Western European countries.During the follow-up, 609 such events occurred to 481 men and 128 women. Regular consumption of alcohol -- beer, wine, or hard liquor -- reduces the risk of heart disease in men by a third or more, according to a new Spanish study.
Arriola and colleagues also found a beneficial effect of alcohol for women's heart health, she says, but it was not strong enough to be considered statistically significant.One difference, she says: Researchers in the new study separated ex-drinkers from lifelong teetotalers in hopes of better understanding the alcohol- heart health link.
In the current research looking at alcohol and heart health, the researchers evaluated 15,630 men and 25,808 women ages 29 to 69, all free of heart disease at the beginning of the study, following them for a median of 10 years (half longer, half less). If somebody already drinks alcohol, then I would advise to drink moderately, eat healthy food, and do some exercise. While drinking was associated with heart health, Arriola is quick to offer this caveat: ''I would not advise anybody to [start to] drink alcohol, because alcohol causes, as we mention in our paper, 8 million deaths a year" in addition to disabilities.
The researchers calculated alcohol intake from a diet history record; a follow-up revealed which participants had a cardiovascular event -- either a heart attack or unstable angina (chest pains) that required a procedure such as a bypass operation or angioplasty.
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