Alcohol Consumption and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Placing New Data in Context PMC

The higher the alcohol consumption within 24 h or one week, the higher the risk for IS or how do you know you got roofied HS 53,80. Heavy drinking, on the other hand, is linked to a number of poor health outcomes, including heart conditions. Excessive alcohol intake can lead to high blood pressure, heart failure or stroke. Excessive drinking can also contribute to cardiomyopathy, a disorder that affects the heart muscle. There is a very clear link between regularly drinking too much alcohol and having high blood pressure.

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Senior Cardiac Nurse Christopher Allen finds out more from Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, Consultant Physician and Gastroenterologist at Royal Liverpool University Hospitals. For instance, the more alcohol you drink at one time, the higher your heart rate gets, according to research from the European Society of Cardiology. A sudden spike in heart rate is potentially dangerous to people with heart conditions, as it could trigger arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats). The acute effects of alcohol on the myocardium include a weakening of the heart’s ability can alcoholics eat food cooked with alcohol to contract (negative inotropic effect).

Future research should focus on executing pragmatic trials investigating the effects of lowering alcohol consumption in a daily clinical practice or on evaluating the impact of certain alcohol consumption regulating policy measures. Even though each of these designs have their own strengths and limitations, combined they can result in a careful triangulation of the evidence. Some people should avoid even that much and not drink at all if they have certain heart rhythm abnormalities or have heart failure. There’s a popular belief that alcohol — especially red wine — is good for the heart. While moderate amounts of alcohol can offer some heart benefits, too much can have damaging effects.

Recent Findings

Nonetheless, these studies too can be affected by confounding due to secular trends that co-occur with alcohol policy changes. Overall, we believe that the evidence from different approaches and study designs, with each their own strengths and limitations, when combined will result into the best available evidence 84, 85 (Fig. 1). Furthermore, to translate the research evidence to prevention in daily care, research on individual patient characteristics and absolute treatment effects is also needed. A 2022 study showed a link between moderate drinking (eight to 16 drinks per week) and a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, but specifically among people who drank alcohol with meals.

Aren’t there some benefits to drinking alcohol?

Assortative mating occurs if an individual with a particular genetic predisposition bases his partner selection on a certain genetically influenced phenotype. Dynastic effects are similar and occur when the expression of the parental genotype in the parental phenotype has a direct effect on their offspring’s phenotype. These are environmental and social factors that have the potential to affect the distribution of genetic variants for specific traits within the population. Studies of other exposures (e.g., BMI or education) have indeed shown that this leads to bias by inducing an association between the instrumental variable and the outcome 74, 75.

1. Some research noted that endothelial function is impaired in abstinent individuals with a long-term history of alcohol abuse or alcoholism(Di Gennaro et al. 2007, 2012; Maiorano et al. 1999).
2. They recommended confirming these results in younger women and in men, particularly since their subjects had been older women, who have more significant cardiovascular risk.
3. These mechanisms contribute to the myocyte cellular changes that lead to intrinsic cell dysfunction, such as sarcoplasmic reticular dysfunction and changes in intracellular calcium handling and myocyte loss.
4. The way in which alcohol consumption has been measured and categorized varies, sometimes making it challenging to compare data among studies.

Can drinking raise my blood pressure?

Psychologically, however, many people feel low in mood after they’re discharged home, especially following open heart surgery. In hospital, your medications are adjusted to control your blood pressure, but you aren’t drinking alcohol at that time. Back home, if you start drinking regularly again and your blood pressure changes, your GP can alter your medications. Too much alcohol can raise blood pressure and weight, increasing risk of a heart attack, stroke and type 2 diabetes.

RCTs are not influenced by these forms of bias and are often regarded as the gold standard to prove causality in the relations between a risk factor and outcome. Due to the difficulty and costs of performing a long-term RCT of limited alcohol consumption on hard outcomes such as CVD, the main body of evidence comes from short-term RCTs on cardiovascular risk factors. Several meta-analyses show that moderate alcohol consumption increased high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, apolipoprotein A1 and adiponectin 59•, 60, 61. Moderate alcohol consumption has also shown to reduce low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, fibrinogen levels, Interleukin-6, HbA1c and fasting insulin concentrations in various studies 59•, 61. A meta-analysis of RCTs up to 2017 performed in people with diabetes showed no effect of moderate alcohol consumption during 4 to 104 weeks on HbA1c or blood glucose 63, although the longest such study to date identified a benefit specifically among those with slow ethanol metabolism 8. Altogether, these studies provide plausible underlying mechanisms not only for the observed risk reduction of myocardial infarction with moderate alcohol consumption, but also for increased risks of other cardiovascular outcomes such as heart failure or stroke.

Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to fight inflammation and improve cognitive health, plus the latest advances in preventative medicine, diet and exercise, pain relief, blood pressure and cholesterol management, and more. But it may be worthwhile learning about what counts as binge drinking and whether or not you may be drinking too much and don’t even know it. Medications such as statins that act directly on the liver can cause further damage when combined with alcohol. Drinking very large amounts all at once can slow your heart rate and breathing down to a dangerously low level. One type of drink isn’t better than another, as your body reacts to alcohol the same whether it’s from beer, wine, or spirits, according to Dr. Gaziano. To get a more accurate analysis of your drink in terms of alcohol content per serving size, use this drink calculator from the National Institutes of Health.

If it’s more than recommended, try to consciously pace your drinking to help reduce the spike in your blood pressure that excessive alcohol causes. And people who drink have lowered inhibitions, which may lead to poor dietary choices. As a result, people who are intoxicated tend not to eat as healthily as they would if they weren’t under the influence.

Drinking alcohol to excess can cause other serious health conditions, such as cardiomyopathy (where the heart muscle is damaged and can’t work as efficiently as it used to) and arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms). Ethanol-induced changes may be related to oxidative or nonoxidative pathways of ethanol metabolism. More than one mechanism may be activated and may lead to mesclun psychedelic the multitude of ethanol-induced changes in cellular proteins and cell function.