Protective Affects of Alcohol to Coronary Heart Disease

Protective Affects of Alcohol to Coronary Heart Disease
A convincing body of evidence suggests that the risk of coronary heart disease is reduced by 10-40% in persons who consume alcohol in moderation.

In some populations , this association can be skewed if individual at higher risk for coronary heart disease reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption due to a diagnosis of a related chronic disease (e.g., hypertension or diabetes).

This is frequently describe as the “sick quitter” syndrome and can create a spurious artificial inverse association between alcohol and coronary heart disease.

Because conditions like hypertension and diabetes increase the risk of coronary heart disease by two fold to threefold, a study that does not consider these conditions may find that moderate drinkers have as much as 50-70% less heart disease.

However, even in large cohort studies where sick quitter are removed or moderate drinker are compared to lifelong abstainers, alcohol has had strong cardiovascular benefits.

There has been much speculation that wine may be more potent than beer or spirits in preventing coronary heart disease.

This is largely based on findings from ecological studies like France that have a high intake of wine have relatively low coronary heart disease.

This is indicated by the findings from case control and cohort studies: these show no clear trend for one type of alcohol to be more consistently associated with protection from coronary heart disease.

Where one type of alcohol does manifest a stronger association than other types, this is likely due to confounding by such factors as smoking and drinking pattern or to differences ion other lifestyle factors such as eating patterns or physical activity.
Protective Affects of Alcohol to Coronary Heart Disease