Heavy drinking may protect men from heart disease,
but the effect in women is less clear, a Japanese study in the American
Heart Association's journal Stroke found.
Men who consumed four or more alcoholic drinks a day lowered the risk of
dying from heart disease by 19 percent, while women drinking the same
amount quadrupled their risk, the study, led by Hiroyasu Iso, professor
at Osaka University, found.
The risk of stroke increased in both men and women.
Cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attack, stroke and
hypertension, is the biggest cause of death, according to the World
Health Organization.
The WHO estimates 20 million people may die from heart disease every
year by 2015, compared with about 17.5 million, or 30 percent of global
death, a decade year earlier.
The protective benefit likely comes from the increase in so-called good
cholesterol that's linked to alcohol, Iso said.
"Alcohol increases the level of good cholesterol, known
as HDL, and inhibits arterial sclerosis and platelets from clotting, and
reduces the risks of getting heart disease, while it surges the blood
pressure in heavy drinking," Iso said in a July telephone interview. "The
results show benefit from taking alcohol exceeded the harm in men."
The study, funded by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science
and Technology, analyzed 34,776 men and 48,906 women age 40 to 79 over 14
years. In that time, 736 people died from heart disease and 1,628 from
stroke, it said.
Iso said that the study might not have been able to detect a protective
effect in women because researchers didn't have enough data from heavy
drinkers. Only 15 percent of women in the study had any liquor, wine or
beer.
"In women, there's a possibility we couldn't analyze the preventative
effects enough because there were few heavy drinkers," he said. "Therefore a
small number of people developed heart disease and died. It's difficult to
show a statistical significance when death cases are low."
Both men and women increased the risk of death from stroke by 48 percent and
92 percent, respectively, through heavy drinking, the researchers said.
