Alcohol's heath benefits overstated?

[Guest guest]

http://tinyurl.com/z22ak

Rodney, especially, will note how statistics on health and alcohol

could be skewed because sicker people give up drinking

THURSDAY, March 30 (HealthDay News) -- Many previous studies

suggesting that moderate drinking helps prevent heart disease may be

flawed, says a report by a group of researchers from Australia,

Canada and the United States.

They analyzed 54 studies that looked at the association between

drinking and risk of premature death from all causes, including

heart disease. The new report concluded that many of those studies

did not account for the effects of age and illness that make

abstainers have higher death rates than moderate drinkers.

The researchers investigated suspicions that many of the abstainers

included in these studies were actually people who'd reduced or quit

drinking due to declining health, frailty, medication use or

disability. They found that only seven of the 54 studies included

only long-term non-drinkers in the abstainers' group. Those seven

studies found no difference in death risk between abstainers and

moderate drinkers.

The findings appear online in advance of the May issue of the

journal Addiction Research and Theory.

" The widely held belief that light or moderate drinking protects

against coronary heart disease has had great influence on alcohol

policy and clinical advice of doctors to their patients throughout

the world. These findings suggest that caution should be exerted in

recommending light drinking to abstainers because of the possibility

that this result may be more apparent than real, " researcher Tim

Stockwell, of the Centre for Addictions Research at the University

of in British Columbia, Canada, said in a prepared

statement.

" We know that older people who are light drinkers are usually

healthier than their non-drinking peers. Our research suggests light

drinking is a sign of good health, not necessarily its cause. Many

people reduce their drinking as they get older for a variety of

health reasons, " Kaye Fillmore, of the University of California, San

Francisco, School of Nursing, added in a prepared statement.

The researchers cautioned that their report doesn't disprove the

idea that light drinking is good for health, because too few error-

free studies have been performed.

Mike