Is Alcohol Good for the Heart? Doctors Raise a Red Warning Flag
Moderate drinkers tend to have less heart disease than teetotalers, according to a new study, but the finding has a lot of doctors worried that the public will interpret it as permission to drink more than is good for them.
The study, by Dr. Arthur Klatsky, a cardiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, found that nondrinkers were more likely to be hospitalized for coronary artery-related heart disease than people who had one or two drinks a day.
Even patients who took three or more drinks a day were less likely to have that type of heart disease than nondrinkers or people who drank less than one drink a month, Klatsky reported at a recent meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Anaheim.
Klatsky’s findings were based on an examination of the records of 100,000 people who had physical examinations at the Kaiser facility between 1978 and 1982. During that period, 756 of the patients subsequently were hospitalized for conditions related to coronary artery disease.
Although Klatsky emphasized that the results of his study do not justify drinking as a means to prevent heart disease, other physicians are concerned that some people will interpret the finding too narrowly.
Smoking Cancels Out Any Good
For example, for the person who drinks moderately but is also a smoker, any preventive effect he may receive from the alcohol may be more than canceled out by the known risk factor of cigarette smoking in causing heart disease, according to Dr. Peter Mahrer, director of cardiology at Kaiser’s medical center in Los Angeles.
In addition, Mahrer pointed out that drinkers run a risk of developing alcohol cardiomyopathy if their daily consumption of drinks is even as low as three or four a day over a long period of time. Cardiomyopathy is a fatal form of heart disease that, unlike coronary artery disease, is not due to clogged coronary arteries.
Klatsky’s study was not the first to conclude that moderate drinkers appear to have less coronary disease. But in most of the studies that arrived at a similar conclusion, the difference in the heart disease mortality rate between the moderate drinkers and nondrinkers was a slight one, according to Dr. Lester Breslow, professor emeritus of public health at UCLA.
Breslow, who was a principal investigator in one such study in Alameda County, said in an interview that the lower mortality from heart disease in moderate drinkers may be due in part to income level rather than to drinking habits. In the United States, he said, nondrinking is heavily concentrated in low-income groups. And, he added, people in the lower-income groups have higher mortality rates than the more affluent part of the population, which is more likely to contain drinkers.
Determine the Relationship
“One needs to be very careful in determining whether the relationship with a more favorable mortality is at least partly accounted for by income level rather than by moderate drinking,†he said.
Heart disease aside, there is lots of evidence associating alcohol with a number of other health problems, including liver disease, accidents and interpersonal conflicts, the physician said. “In view of those things, I wouldn’t recommend anybody taking alcohol to avoid heart disease,†he said.
