Alcohol linked to better survival after heart attack
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who drank anywhere from a few drinks a month to more than three alcoholic beverages a week in the year leading up to a heart attack ended up living longer than women who never drank alcohol, according to a new study.
The results add to mounting evidence that alcoholic beverages -- regardless of the type of drink -- can be beneficial for heart health.
"One drink a day is a really good target, assuming that a person can be disciplined about that," said Dr. James O'Keefe, a cardiologist at St. Luke's Health System in Kansas City, Missouri.
In the study, researchers surveyed more than 1,200 women who had been hospitalized with a heart attack.
They asked questions about how many alcoholic drinks the women usually consumed, in addition to other health and lifestyle questions.
After at least 10 years of follow up, the team found that 44 out of every 100 women who had abstained from alcohol had died, while 25 out of every 100 light drinkers and 18 out of every 100 heavy drinkers had died.
This translated to about a 35 percent lower chance of dying during the follow up period for women who drank, compared to those who didn't.
Light drinkers were considered women who had less than one drink a week, and heavy drinkers were those who had more than three alcoholic beverages a week.
The American Heart Association recommends that if people drink, they limit it to about one drink per day.
"One thing that was interesting was that we didn't see differences among different beverage types," said Joshua Rosenbloom, a student at Harvard Medical School who led the study.
Whether the women drank wine, beer or hard liquor, Rosenbloom and his colleagues found a similarly reduced risk of dying within the follow-up period.
"The most recent evidence suggests that it's the alcohol itself that's beneficial," Rosenbloom told Reuters Health, though his study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, did not prove that the alcohol was responsible for the drinkers' longevity.
O'Keefe, who was not involved in this study, agreed that alcohol is likely to thank for these women's lower chance of dying, but how alcohol protects the heart has not been worked out.
It's also not clear whether women's behavior after the heart attack might have played a role, because they were only asked about their drinking habits for the year preceding the heart attack.
In an earlier study including men and women, O'Keefe found that people who continued to drink moderately after having a heart attack had better health than those who abstained (see Reuters Health story of May 5, 2010).
"You don't need to assume that people need to stop drinking once they develop heart disease," said O'Keefe.
"The problem is that alcohol is a slippery slope, and while we know that a little bit is good for us, a lot of it is really bad," he added.
