Downing six or more drinks today significantly increases your risk of experiencing heart attacks and strokes over the next seven days, a new study presented at the American Heart Association meeting suggests. However, moderate drinking lowers the risk of heart problems.
While drinking always carries long term heart risks, researchers recently discovered that moderate alcohol consumption actually benefits the heart by lowering the risk of cardiovascular complications after 24 hours. However, heavy drinking still carried high risk of heart attacks and strokes 24 hours after consumption.
The study defined moderate alcohol consumption as having anywhere between two to four drinks, and heavy alcohol consumption as having more than six drinks.
"There appears to be a transiently higher risk of heart attack and strokes in the hours after drinking an alcoholic beverage but within a day after drinking, only heavy alcohol intake seems to pose a higher cardiovascular risk," lead author Elizabeth Mostofsky, of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a news release.
Researchers said the latest study is important because it examines the immediate, rather than long-term, risks of alcohol consumption.
"Ours is the first to synthesize all the available information to gain new knowledge on the acute risk of heart attacks and strokes in the hours after drinking and the risk in the following week for different amounts of alcohol consumed," Mostofsky said.
Mostofsky and her team said that alcohol is both harmful and beneficial. While it disrupts heartbeat immediately after consumption, it also improves blood flow vessel function and reduces clotting the next day.
"There appears to be a consistent finding of an immediately higher cardiovascular risk following any alcohol consumption but by 24 hours, only heavy alcohol intake conferred continued risk," researchers wrote in the study.
"Just after drinking, blood pressure rises and blood platelets become stickier, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes," Mostofsky explained. "However, regularly drinking small amounts of alcohol in the long term appears to both increase levels of HDL cholesterol (high density lipoprotein cholesterol), the so-called good cholesterol, and reduce the tendency to form blood clots."
The latest study was published in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
