Moderate Alcohol Consumption Questioned
Light Drinking May Not be as Heart-Healthy as Assumed
Jun 18, 2009
The studies that say the daily glass of wine or beer helps prevent heart disease and even diabetes and dementia may be flawed.
Kaye Middleton Fillmore is a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. She is quoted in The New York Times (June 15, 2009) as saying, “The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right - they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right, and they drink moderately. It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”
Early Studies Claim Moderate Drinking to be Heart Healthy
Raymond Pearl was the first to make the association between moderate drinking and lower heart attack rates. He was a biologist at Johns Hopkins University who, in 1926, published a book, “Alcohol and Longevity,” in which he showed higher death rates among heavy drinkers and non-drinkers than among moderate drinkers.
He didn’t seem to accept the results of his own research. He was known as a party animal and hard boozer. He died in 1940 at the age of 61 of an apparent heart attack.
Three decades later, Dr. Arthur L. Klatsky, a cardiologist in Oakland, California published a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine (September 1974) in which he found, “A statistically significant negative association between alcohol consumption and a subsequent first myocardial infarction in 464 patients…” He said that teetotalers were more likely to suffer a heart attack than those who drank moderately, which he defined as two or fewer drinks a day.
Dr. Klatsky’s study was controlled for those who smoked cigarettes or exhibited five other risk factors. There have been scores of studies since that have come to a similar conclusion that light drinking offers some protection against heart disease.
Quality of Alcohol Studies Questioned
In the April 2006 issue of the journal Addiction Research and Theory Dr. Kaye Fillmore and her colleagues challenged the quality of alcohol research. She reviewed 54 such studies to test “the extent to which a systematic misclassification error was committed by including as ‘abstainers’ many people who had reduced or stopped drinking, a phenomenon associated with ageing and ill health.”
She found that the error-free studies produced results that said moderate drinking offered no significant heart benefits, “suggesting that the cardiac protection afforded by alcohol may have been over-estimated. Estimates of mortality from heavier drinking may also be higher than previously estimated.”
Top Quality Studies of Alcohol Consumption Missing
Dr. Tim Naimi, is an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Monitoring in Atlanta, Georgia. He told Roni Caryn Rabin of the Times that, “The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study - the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country.”
More research – double-blind, randomized, long-term, large, and funded by neutral agencies - is needed. It may turn out that the much-touted benefits of the daily tot of grog have nothing to do with the drink itself but are due to such factors as educational level, income, psychological profile, age, or something else.
 |
