Moderate Drinking May Cut Diabetes Risk

A moderate amount of alcohol appears to reduce the risk of developing adult-onset (type 2) diabetes; however, for women, heavy drinking increases the risk, according to a Scandinavian study.

Dr. Sofia Carlsson, of Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, and colleagues looked at alcohol consumption and the occurrence of type 2 diabetes in almost 23,000 twins enrolled in the Finnish Twin Cohort. Twin studies are often used in medical research to tease out genetic and environmental factors involved in diseases.

Participants completed questionnaires in 1975, 1981, and 1990 about alcohol use, smoking, diet, physical activity, medical and social conditions. Over 20 years of follow-up, 580 cases of type 2 diabetes were identified.

Compared with low alcohol consumption (less than 5 grams per day), moderate alcohol consumption (5 to 30 g/day for men and 5 to 20 g/day for women) was linked to a reduction in the occurrence of type 2 diabetes.

"The estimates were lower in overweight subjects," Carlsson and colleagues report in the medical journal Diabetes Care.

The investigators also saw that high levels of alcohol consumption (at least 20 g/day) appeared to increase the likelihood of diabetes for lean women, but not for overweight women or men.

Also, binge drinking increased the number of diabetes cases among women.

In an analysis of pairs of twins with different alcohol habits, those with moderate levels of alcohol consumption had half the risk of diabetes compared with those with low levels of alcohol consumption.

The researchers say these results are in line with a number of previous studies that have shown that moderate alcohol consumers have a 30-to-40 percent reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, October 2003.

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