A drink a day keeps heart failure away, research shows

By GENE EMERY

Good news for drinkers - frequent tippling of beer, wine or even spirits lowers a man's risk of heart attack, and how often, not how much, appears to be the key.

Regular male drinkers cut their risk of heart attack by about one-third compared with non-drinkers, US research shows.

The study, which tracked the drinking habits of more than 38,000 men over 12 years, provides a clue to how alcohol helps guard against heart disease, and for the first time suggests that routine consumption is vital.

"Even relatively modest amounts of alcohol may be protective if consumed frequently," said the chief author of the study, Kenneth Mukamal, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston.

The study included only men and the findings do not necessarily apply to women. It also looked at the benefits of different types of alcohol and found that wine offered no more protection than beer or hard liquor. Earlier research had suggested that wine was better.

But an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, where the study appeared, warned that it should not be used as an excuse for heavy drinking because the risks of excess alcohol consumption were serious and drinkers may be prone to die young from accidents and other causes.

"Substitution of one disease for another is not a medical advance," wrote Ira Goldberg of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Dr Mukamal said the findings suggested it was frequency of consumption that did the job.

"We think it may be much like people who take aspirin every day or every other day. A little bit of alcohol on a regular basis helps keep the platelets from becoming sticky and prevents heart attacks."

He acknowledged that his study did not look at whether drinkers lived longer, only whether they were less prone to a heart attack.

However, he noted that heart disease was the dominant cause of death among the men in the study, who were middle-aged and older.

Dr Mukamal said alcohol affected women differently from men and it would be "premature and unwise" to extrapolate the results beyond men. "Even moderate drinking [by women] has been associated with a higher risk of breast cancer.

"At the same time, women are on average at lower risk for heart disease than men and are therefore less likely to benefit from the apparent effects on the heart," he said.

He added: "Doctors need to be honest about what alcohol does and does not do. There may be people for whom the decision to have a drink a day may be the right one."

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Health