Alcohol a help for women says study

A couple of drinks a day may help to prevent diabetes in older women, and it seems any kind of alcohol may work, doctors report.

Women on a controlled diet who were given specially prepared alcoholic drinks had better control of their insulin - key in treating and preventing diabetes - than women given similar drinks without alcohol.

The drinks were made with orange juice and pure ethanol, so it may be that any alcoholic drink will do the trick, the doctors said. But they emphasised that more tests were needed.

About 15 million Americans have type-II or adult-onset diabetes, which is strongly linked to diet and exercise.

Patients should watch what they eat, and drink, to control their blood sugar. Alcohol generally lowers blood sugar.

Michael Davies and David Baer, of the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Centre, tested 63 women with diabetes.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they said women who had two drinks a day had a healthier use of insulin, the hormone affected by diabetes, than women given plain orange drink. It did not matter if the women were overweight.

"Consumption of 30g a day of alcohol reduced insulin concentration and improved insulin sensitivity in nondiabetic, postmenopausal women independent of body mass index," they wrote.

The women were randomly assigned to consume no alcohol, one drink a day or two drinks.

"The observed changes with alcohol intake may reduce the risk of developing type-II diabetes and cardiovascular disease in this population of women," Baer's team wrote. But Baer said more was not better. "Drinking alcohol in excess is detrimental."

Moderate drinking can reduce the risk of heart disease, but drinking can raise a woman's risk of breast and colon cancer.

But anything that might help people control diabetes was good, said Dr Christopher Saudek of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

"While new cases of heart disease and cancer are stable or decreasing, the incidence of diabetes has increased 6 per cent in the United States and more than that in developing countries."

A second study found the less a woman weighed when she was born, the higher her risk for pregnancy-related diabetes when she grew up and became pregnant.

- REUTERS

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