Drinking a little alcohol is not beneficial for health

Research led by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) published in the journal Addiction confirms that drinking a lot of alcohol harms health in older people, which is evidenced by higher levels of GDF-15, a novel biomarker of chronic disease burden . The work also confirms that drinking small amounts does not provide any benefit.

Drinking a lot of alcohol is harmful to health, but the effects of drinking just a little are not so clear. Some epidemiological studies in Anglo-Saxon countries had observed that drinking one or two alcoholic beverages a day was associated with lower mortality from cardiovascular disease. But these studies had several methodological problems.

In fact, more recent and higher quality studies have shown that, although consuming a little alcohol can reduce the risk of myocardial infarction, a very specific type of cardiovascular disease, the harms for other diseases, and especially for cancer, are much older; therefore, even small amounts of alcohol could harm health.

To clarify whether or not consuming a little alcohol is beneficial to health, researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), Hospital La Paz in Madrid, CIBERESP and IMDEA-Alimentación studied more than 2,000 people over 65 years of age drinkers or ex-drinkers, and collected data on their lifetime alcohol consumption, other lifestyles, illnesses, etc.

The researchers also measured blood GDF-15, a biomarker of chronic disease burden that is elevated when disease is present, even when symptoms have not yet appeared.

The study, financed by the National Plan on Drugs, used very rigorous methods of data analysis, such as considering all alcohol consumed throughout life, instead of only that consumed today.

“This allowed ex-drinkers to be assigned to their drinking groups based on lifetime alcohol consumption rather than removing them from those groups. In this way, common errors in these studies are avoided, since many ex-drinkers stopped drinking due to health problems, and by eliminating them, an apparent better health could be observed in those who continue to drink”, the authors explain.

In addition, the researchers separately studied people with diabetes or cardiovascular disease and those without these diseases, in order to establish whether alcohol influences health. They also took into account many characteristics of the participants, both sociodemographic and lifestyle.

The more you drink, the higher levels of GDF-15

The authors found that in healthy people (without diabetes or cardiovascular disease), alcohol consumption was only associated with GDF-15 levels in heavy drinkers (more than two drinks a day for women and more than four for men). , increasing 2.7% with each glass of alcohol.

In contrast, in the sick, heavy drinkers had 27% higher GDF-15 levels than light drinkers (less than one drink per day in women, and less than two in men). Additionally, GDF-15 increased by almost 2% with each drink of alcohol.

“The context in which you drink was also important. Thus, in healthy participants, having a Mediterranean pattern of alcohol consumption, characterized by drinking little, preferably wine, and only during meals or accompanied by a Mediterranean diet, was associated with somewhat lower levels of GDF-15. These results are probably due more to the fact that consuming with food reduces blood alcohol levels, or to the Mediterranean diet, than to the alcohol itself”, the authors detail.

Thus, the results show the harm of drinking a lot of alcohol on GDF-15, but they have not found any benefit of drinking little.

"This has important practical implications, because it suggests that older people would not improve their health by drinking little, but their chronic diseases could be aggravated by drinking more."

In addition, the authors conclude, although the observed associations do not seem very large, based on associations from other studies between GDF-15 and many chronic diseases and also with mortality, they do have great relevance from the point of view of public health given Alcohol consumption is widespread in the population.

_____________________

Bibliographic reference:

Ortolá, R., García-Esquinas, E., Buño-Soto, A., Carballo-Casla, A., Sotos-Prieto, M., Banegas, JR, Rodríguez-Artalejo, F. 2022. Alcohol consumption patterns and growth differentiation factor 15 among life-time drinkers aged 65+ years in Spain: a cross-sectional study . Addiction . doi: 10.1111/add.15809.

More scientific culture in UAM Gazette .