Having a drink each day may help protect a person's heart against disease, a large-scale study suggests. But don't bend that elbow too often: drinking to excess can increase your risk for a variety of heart problems, the study also showed. Researchers tracked more than 1.9 million healthy British adults and found that having the occasional drink was tied to reductions in the risk of heart attack, sudden heart death, heart failure and stroke, compared to non-drinkers. In the study, "moderate" drinking was defined as 7 pints of regular beer or 1.5 bottles of wine  in one week, researchers said in background notes. Drinking more than that increased the risk of many heart health problems, researchers found. Those included sudden heart death, heart failure, cardiac arrest and stroke. "We have shown that heavy drinking increases a person's risk of developing a variety of different types of cardiovascular disease as well as raising their risk of dying from non-cardiovascular causes," said lead researcher Steven Bell. He's a genetic epidemiologist with the University of Cambridge in England.
Despite these results, non-drinkers shouldn't feel pressure to pick up a bottle for their heart health, even though the study showed some potential benefit from casual drinking, Bell said. "There are safer and more effective ways of reducing cardiovascular risk, such as increasing levels of physical activity, maintaining a healthy diet and quitting smoking, which do not incur increased risks of harm such as alcohol dependence, liver disease and certain types of cancer," Bell said.
For this study, researchers at the University of Cambridge and University College London investigated the potential link between alcohol consumption and 12 cardiovascular diseases by analyzing electronic health records for nearly 2 million adults with good heart health.
HealthDay