Drinking alcohol seems to protect the hearts of Spanish men, but not Spanish women, findings from a large study suggest.

However, men should not begin drinking to protect themselves from heart disease, cautions lead investigator Larrarte Arriola, of the Public Health Department of Gipuzkoa, Basque Government in San Sebastian, Spain, since “alcohol is a cause of thousands of deaths,” she noted in an email to Reuters Health.

Arriola and colleagues assessed the drinking habits in the year prior to study entry among 15,630 men and 25,808 women, 26 to 69 years old. Over the next 10 years, they tracked heart attacks and other heart-related “events” that occurred in these individuals.

Most of them were free of heart disease at the outset. Over 10 years, 481 men and 128 women suffered a heart-related event. The rate of heart-related events per 100,000 persons per year was 300 for men and 48 for women.

In the medical journal Heart, Arriola and colleagues report that heart-related events were at least 30 percent less likely among moderate, high, and very high drinking men in analyses that allowed for other factors linked with heart disease including older age, smoking, education, physical activity and weight.

Type of alcohol consumed did not influence the association.

The researchers describe moderate drinking as 5 to 30 grams (0.2 to 1.2 ounces) of alcohol a day on average, while high and very high drinkers reported daily consumption of 30 to 90 grams (1.2 to 3.6 ounces), and more than 90 grams, respectively. A glass of wine contains about 8 to 10 grams of alcohol.

The researchers did not find a similar protective association among women, however, likely because of their low number of heart-related events.

Previous investigations have reported similar findings in other groups, the researchers note. But their study stands out because they separately analyzed the typically less healthy former drinkers and abstainers. This allowed Arriola’s team to show that former drinkers’ poor health status, not their alcohol abstinence, elevated their heart disease risk.

This factor further strengthens the association of lower heart disease risk for drinkers, Arriola said, as the current study noted lower risk even in high drinkers compared with never drinkers.

SOURCE: Heart, January 15, 2010