Study Links Alcohol Abuse To Higher Heart Risks: See Details Here!

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A new study has found a link between excessive alcohol consumption and heart problems - the major cause of death worldwide. The study discovered that alcohol Abuse increases the risk of atrial fibrillation, heart attack or heart failure.

"...People who abused alcohol are at increased risk for heart attack or myocardial infarction," director of clinical research in the Division of Cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the study, Dr. Gregory M. Marcus says.

Director of women's heart health at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, said both scientists and the media have been highlighting the good components of alcohol, such as resveratrol in wine, and have been pushing that a glass of wine is good for our health, but the bottom line of this new study is clear, she said.

The National Institutes of Health frequently highlights the ways in which too much drinking can lead to accidents, liver cirrhosis and cancer but yet, cardiovascular studies have suggested that moderate consumption of alcohol is good for the heart health.

The researchers cite a 2007 study published in the journal Circulation which concluded that not only did moderate drinking lead to no negative effects it may lower the risk of heart failure.

Marcus and his team decided to investigate how excessive drinking might contribute to the development of atrial fibrillation or arrhythmic beating of the heart; myocardial infarction (heart attack) and congestive heart failure - a condition where the heart cannot effectively pump blood through the arteries and circulatory system to other parts of the body, according to CNN.

Alcohol abuse was defined by the researchers as an instance where a health care provider flagged a patient as having a problem with excessive alcohol use, either acutely or chronically.

They looked at California residents, 21 and older, who had been hospitalized anytime between 2005 and 2009 in the healthcare cost and utilization project's California state ambulatory surgery databases, state inpatient databases and emergency department databases.

The researchers analyzed the medical records of 14,727,591 patients and found that 1.8%, or approximately 268,000, had been diagnosed with alcohol abuse. Marcus noted that there was no specific cut off regarding the specific amount of alcohol or time period and that this was a limitation of the study.

The researchers found that alcohol abuse is associated with atrial fibrillation, heart attack and heart failure. To be specific, they discovered that alcohol abuse doubles the risk of atrial fibrillation, 1.4 fold higher risk of heart attack and 2.3 fold increased risk of congestive heart failure.

They added that the number of people who would develop atrial fibrillation, heart attack or heart failure in three years was higher if they had an established risk factor and abused alcohol, according to Fox 2 Now.

They also compared alcohol abuse to the conventional risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. The team concluded that eliminating alcohol abuse would result in over 73,000 less atrial fibrillation cases, 34,000 less heart attacks and 91,000 less cases of congestive heart failure in the United States.

The researchers published their findings on Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.