Moderate Drinking Tied to Risk of Stage 1, 2 Hypertension
By Marlene Busko
March 13, 2019
NEW ORLEANS — Studies have established that heavy drinkers are more likely to have hypertension compared with non-drinkers, and now new research confirms the link to high blood pressure and extends the finding to those consuming moderate amounts of alcohol.
In a snapshot of a national sample of adult Americans, researchers found that compared to abstainers, men and women who drank 7 to 13 alcoholic drinks a week (moderate drinkers) were 1.5 times as likely to have stage 1 hypertension and twice as likely to have stage 2 hypertension, based on criteria in the new 2017 ACC/AHA hypertension guidelines.
Heavy drinkers (14 or more drinks per week) had a similar, slightly higher risk of having stage 1 or stage 2 hypertension vs abstainers.
Lead author Amer I. Aladin, MD, a cardiology fellow at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, presented these findings in a media briefing and will present the results at this weekend’s American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2019 Annual Scientific Session.
“Moderate drinking in our study was associated with risk of hypertension, whereas in previous studies [it] showed moderate drinking was beneficial,” Aladin told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology in an email.
The public health message is that people should ask their providers to check their blood pressure at each visit, especially if they are moderate or heavy drinkers, he said.
Invited to comment for Medscape Medical News, Michael Roerecke, PhD, a scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, similarly noted that “screening for both alcohol consumption and elevated blood pressure are not done regularly and should be conducted more often in clinical practice.”
“Heavy drinkers should talk to their clinician about their risk and reduce drinking in consultations with their physician,” he told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology in an email.
Furthermore, although light drinking (1-6 drinks per week) was not associated with elevated blood pressure in this study, “binge drinking episodes (in the US defined as 4 or more drinks within a 2-hour period for women, and 5 or more drinks for men), may increase the risk for hypertension even when the average drinking over the week is low,” he pointed out.
Alcohol has many effects on the body and mind, Roerecke noted. It is a known carcinogenic, hepatotoxin, and neurotoxin in humans. “Safe [consumption] may reduce the risk of myocardial infarction or type 2 diabetes; however, the risk for other diseases is elevated for any amount of drinking, which is the reason that no level of drinking is safe.”