In a conflicting study at Harvard University it was found that women who drink just four small glasses of wine a week increase their risk of developing breast cancer by 15%, while those who drank up to four units a day were 50% more likely to develop breast cancer.
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“A fundamental question is, who are these moderate drinkers being compared against?” However, study author, Thomas Truelsen, MD, PhD, emphasised that “These results don’t mean that people should start drinking wine or drink more wine than they usually do”.
However, the new research from Stockwell and colleagues suggests the results of such studies should not be taken at face value, after finding that many of them are subject to biases that, when accounted for, eliminate the reported health benefits of moderate drinking.
One major problem in most these studies, the researchers found, was that researchers compared moderate drinkers (people who have up to two drinks per day) to people who don’t now drink, or abstainers, without sufficiently accounting for the differences between them. That’s a problem because many people stop drinking when they get ill or old. Researchers often did a poor job of asking about alcohol use and accounting for other protective factors among drinkers, such as wealth and eating more fruits and vegetables, Stockwell said.
The study was published Monday in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
When Dr Stockwell’s team corrected for abstainer biases and other alleged study design issues, moderate drinkers no longer showed a longevity advantage.
Dust off your mocktail recipes: The widespread belief that one or two alcoholic drinks per day is associated with living longer rests on flawed research, concludes an analysis of 87 previously-published studies appearing on Tuesday.
But, that finding is implausible, for Dr Stockwell noted, ‘Those people would be getting a biologically insignificant dose of alcohol’.
In their analysis, the researchers found that only 13 of the studies they assessed avoided biases in the abstainer group, and these studies demonstrated no mortality benefits with moderate drinking.
“Either alcohol is a panacea or moderate drinking is really a marker of something else”.
Dr Stockwell added that the current study didn’t look into whether certain types of alcohol – such as red wine – are tied to a longer life.
He says: “There’s a general idea out there that alcohol is good for us, because that’s what you hear reported all the time”.
He said: ‘But if that were the case, it would be unlikely that the alcohol content itself deserved the credit’. Do “moderate” drinkers have reduced mortality risk?
“It may be very pleasurable and enjoyable, and at low levels probably does you very little harm or risk of harm, but I think we shouldn’t assume the widespread message is true, that it is actually good for you in moderation”, he said.
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“The study that’s come out is very biased, it comes from an organisation that has a very longstanding anti-alcohol position”.
