Heavy drinking may effect genders differently
Reported August 13, 2008Heavy 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.