Type of alcoholic beverage and first acute myocardial infarction: A case‐control study in a mediterranean country

Abstract

SummaryBackground: Although international comparisons have consistently found an inverse association between wine and coronary heart disease, few epidemiologic studies are available in Southern Europe. We assessed the association of wine, red wine, and the pattern of drinking wine during meals with the risk of myocardial infarction.Hypothesis: We specifically evaluated three hypotheses: (1) Is the protection against incidence of nonfatal myocardial infarction stronger for wine than for other alcoholic beverages? (2) Does the wine consumed during meals represent a more beneficial pattern of alcohol consumption? (3) Is red wine more advantageous than other types of wine?Methods: A case-control study (171 cases, 171 matched controls) was conducted in Spain. Multiple dietary and nondietary potential confounders were assessed.Results: Exposure to wine, red wine, and wine during meals was associated with risk reductions similar to those of other alcoholic beverages (point estimates of the odds ratio for low and high intake were 0.48 and 0.38 for wine; 0.42 and 0.55 for other beverages). However, after controlling for total alcohol intake, wine consumption (g/day) improved the prediction of a myocardial infarction.Conclusions: Our data showed that red wine or drinking wine during meals was similar to alcohol from other sources

Cholesterol crystals piercing the arterial plaque and intima trigger local and systemic inflammation

“…6,7 providing protective effects from acute events. [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] This finding lends additional support to the concept that cholesterol crystals could be triggering a systemic inflammation response by vascular injury.…”

“…[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] In all cases, we have found statins, ethanol, and ASA to be effective solvents of cholesterol crystals. In the context of our model, dissolving the cholesterol crystals provides protection from volume expansion and intimal injury reducing acute clinical events.…”

Development of a short dietary intake questionnaire for the quantitative estimation of adherence to a cardioprotective Mediterranean diet

“…This score was inversely associated with the risk of myocardial infarction. Regarding individual food items, in previous analyses using the fulllength 136-item questionnaire, we found a significant protection for olive oil (Fernández-Jarne et al, 2002a), fibre and fruit , fish and wine (Fernández-Jarne et al, 2003). In the present analysis, most of these individual items lost their statistical significance (data not shown), probably because we used only two categories of consumption instead of using quintiles (Martínez-González and Sánchez-Villegas, 2004).…”

Dietary Patterns, Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Adults: A Meta-Analysis

“…An electronic literature search in the database of MEDLINE and EBSCO identified 560 studies, 525 of which were excluded based on the reasons listed in Figure 1 : meta-analysis, reviews or systematic reviews ( n = 173); title and abstract did not contain the data on classification of dietary pattern or alcohol consumption ( n = 278); did not provide sufficient dichotomous data on dietary pattern and CHD ( n = 25); focused on single nutrients or food ( n = 18); did not provide the data about percent of CHD or number of each group ( n = 20); reported data using different alcohol consumption categories ( n = 10); and reported the same data ( n = 1). At last, 35 articles [ 8 , 11 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 ] (reporting 37 original studies) met the inclusion criteria and were included in this meta-analysis. Descriptive information of each included study was presented in Table 1 .…”