Alcohol in Moderation Is Good for Sick Hearts Too, Italian Study Suggests

[The Straight Story]

Alcohol in Moderation Is Good for Sick Hearts Too, Italian Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2010) — A study by the Catholic University of Campobasso, Italy, shows that regular and moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial for people who had a previous heart attack or other ischemic vascular events.

The question has been an open one in medicine. Whereas research has shown beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption in healthy people, it was not clear whether this could be valid also for patients who already had heart attack, stroke or another ischemic vascular event. A positive answer comes now from a study performed by the Research Laboratories at the Catholic University of Campobasso, Italy: moderate consumption, defined as one or two glasses of wine a day or the equivalent amounts of beer or other alcoholic beverages, significantly reduces the risk of death from any cause in those who already suffered from ischemic vascular disease.

The research, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), was performed using the statistic procedure of meta-analysis which allows to combine different studies conducted worldwide to achieve more precise results. Researchers analyzed the most important scientific studies performed during the last years. Eight in total in four Countries: United States, Sweden, Japan and Great Britain. Each study took into account patients already affected by an ischemic vascular event. During the years following the disease onset, patients were followed by researchers to know which were the lifestyle habits, including alcohol consumption, able to avoid a new clinical event. The meta-analysis allowed to pool all those studies for a total of 16,351 people examined.

"We observed," says Simona Costanzo, epidemiologist and first author of the study, "that regular and moderate consumption has beneficial effects even for people already affected by heart attack, or stroke. Not only they are less likely to be affected by similar diseases again, but all-cause mortality too resulted to be lower than in those who did not consume any alcoholic beverage."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100322182014.htm

[safeinOhio]

1. For years I have had about

1/2 shot of Jack in my morning coffee. Other than that I'll drink half a beer when I fry fish once a month.
I don't know if I'll live any longer, but, damn that coffee taste good in the morning.

[CTyankee]

2. Leave it to the Italians! They even give some patients in the hospitals a glass of wine

with their dinner trays every evening...

Yet in this country we yammer on and on about alcohol...we think it's an either/or situation: either you get roaring drunk or you become a teetotaler. It's crazy. When I go to Italy I see Italians in bars where they serve coffee and wine at all hours of the day and night. While I can't imagine drinking wine at 11 a.m. they don't seem to be terribly affected. Seems to me that their food and their wine are "sacraments"!