Moderate drinking helps heart, but don't binge

One or two alcoholic drinks a day can help healthy people-and heart patients-live longer, new research confirms.

But the two new studies-one of nearly 250,000 US adults, the other an analysis of eight previous studies of more than 16,000 people with heart disease and other problems related to clogged arteries-also show that drinkers who exceeded recommended limits for alcohol consumption saw no heart health benefits.

"No question, heavy or binge drinking can have adverse health outcomes," Dr. Simona Costanzo and colleagues from Catholic University in Campobasso, Italy, warn in their report.

However, they add, doctors should tell their patients with heart disease and other clogged artery-related problems, together known as cardiovascular disease, that moderate alcohol consumption-a drink a day for women, two for men-"should not be harmful to their health."

There is considerable evidence that moderate drinking helps reduce the risk of heart disease and death from heart-related causes, likely due to the fact that drinking alcohol is linked to higher levels of "good" cholesterol.

However, questions have been raised about how research on alcohol and health is done, Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and his team, the authors of the other study, write.

To address these issues, Mukamal and his colleagues looked at nine years' worth of data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1987 to 2000, including 245,207 people in all. Census bureau employees perform the survey in person every year, sampling a representative group of around 20,000 to 40,000 US citizens.

The researchers correlated the information on alcohol consumption with data from the National Death Index up until 2002, identifying 10,670 deaths from cardiovascular causes among survey participants.

The risk of dying due to heart disease or stroke was about the same for people who had never drank, meaning they had less than 12 drinks in their lifetime; people who drank infrequently, meaning they had more than 12 drinks in their life, but never drank more than 12 drinks in a given year; and ex-drinkers, who had more than 12 drinks in their lives and had consumed more than 12 drinks per year in the past, the researchers found.

But for light drinkers, defined as men or women who had three drinks a week or less, risk was 31 percent lower than for non-drinkers.

Among moderate drinkers (women who had three to seven drinks each week and men who had three to 14 drinks a week), risk was 38 percent lower than it was for abstainers.

Heavy drinkers, meaning women who had more than seven drinks a week and men who downed more than 14 drinks weekly, had the same cardiovascular death risk as non-drinkers.

Mukamal and his team also found that people who had two drinks on days when they consumed alcohol were "consistently" at lower risk than people who had three or more drinks per drinking day.