BRITAIN: If you think a glass of wine in the evening is good for your heart, think again.
The long-held belief that moderate drinking reduces the risk of heart attack is based on flawed data and is most likely wrong, according to a new study.
"Our results suggest that light drinking is a sign of good health, and not necessarily its cause," said epidemiologist Kaye Fillmore of the University of California.
The new findings, published online in the journal Addiction Research and Theory, are an outgrowth of ideas first proposed 15 years ago by Dr AG Shaper of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London.
In his studies on heart disease and death, Shaper observed that many people who abstained from alcohol did so because of advancing age, serious illness or the use of drugs whose effects were altered by alcohol.
He has warned since then that counting such people as abstainers in alcohol studies would bias the results because their increased likelihood of disease and death was unrelated to the fact that they didn't drink.
The idea that drinking might be beneficial "is such an appealing hypothesis" that few have taken him seriously, he said. "It's a lovely story, an appealing story. Doctors like it, patients like it, everybody likes it." - Los Angeles Times/Washington Post