MONDAY, Sept. 16, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Moderate amounts of alcohol may help protect post-menopausal women against heart disease by raising levels of good cholesterol and prompting other changes in the blood.
That's the conclusion of a study in the September issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Dutch researchers found that post-menopausal women who are moderate alcohol consumers get the same heart protection benefits as those found in previous research on middle-age men.
Moderate drinking results in higher levels of good cholesterol, high density lipoproteins (HDL), shown to predict a low risk of coronary artery disease and heart attacks. Alcohol also increases activity levels of an HDL-associated enzyme called paraoxonase (PON) and of apolipoprotein A-1, which is a protein component of HDL that supports its heart benefits, the researchers say.
"Increased serum HDL-cholesterol and PON activity may be a mechanism of action not only in healthy middle-aged men, but also in post-menopausal women, underlying the reduced heart disease risk in moderate drinkers," says Henk F.J. Hendriks of TNO Nutrition and Food Research in the Netherlands.
The study included nine post-menopausal women, aged 49 to 62, and 10 men aged 45 to 64. They all did beer drinking and non-drinking phases, each lasting three weeks. The men had four glasses of beer or "near-beer" with dinner while the women had three glasses.
After 10 days of the drinking phase, there was an average 7 percent increase in the subjects' HDL-cholesterol levels and an average 12 percent increase by the end of the three-week drinking phase. There was no such increase during the non-drinking phase.
Protein component levels increased by just under 4 percent five days into the alcohol phase and were up almost 9 percent by the end of the drinking phase, the study found. PON levels also increased during the drinking phase.
Findings from previous studies indicate that a 2 percent increase in HDL cholesterol is linked with a 2 percent to 4 percent reduction in coronary heart disease risk.
More information
You can check out The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to learn more about the effect of alcohol on women's health.
