A new study has looked at the impact of alcohol consumption at different ages. It shows that the health risks could be less serious in people over 50 and that, on the contrary, they are underestimated in younger people.
You’ve probably come across it while surfing the Internet: press articles claiming, with supporting scientific studies, that moderate alcohol consumption has beneficial effects on health. This onefor example, published in 2017, claimed that light to moderate alcohol consumption was protective against all-cause mortality.
However, not all scientists agree with this conclusion. In a study recently published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugsthe team of Dr. Timothy Naimi, of the Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts, questions the methodology generally used in this work.
Unreliable studies
As optimistic and guilt-free these studies are for those who like to drink a glass of alcohol from time to time, they are more often observational and are not of proven scientific rigor, explains Dr. Naimi. At issue: the profile of the participants. Indeed, these works tend to include people aged 50 and over.
This poses a real problem, since this age group effectively excludes anyone who died as a result of alcohol consumption before the age of 50. However, “deceased persons cannot be enrolled in cohort studies,” the study authors dryly point out. According to them, those who are established drinkers at age 50 are “survivors” of their alcohol consumption who, to begin with, might have been healthier or had more “safer” drinking habits than others.
This work is all the more biased since more than 40% of deaths due to alcohol occur before the age of 50. This therefore suggests that they underestimate the risk associated with alcohol, especially among the youngest. In addition, explain the researchers, the participants, generally elderly, are not representative of all people who consume alcohol.
Underestimated risks in the youngest
To get more reliable data, Dr. Naimi and his team used software called Alcohol-Related Disease Impact, which compiles data from all of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data used comes from government statistics on causes of death and health benefits from 2006 to 2010 in the United States. So, can light to moderate alcohol consumption protect?
The researchers found that age was a significant factor in deaths averted “thanks to” alcohol consumption. The data collected and analyzed clearly show that younger people are particularly vulnerable to alcohol. Thus, approximately 35.8% of all alcohol-caused deaths occurred in people aged 20-49. Conversely, only 4.5% of deaths determined to have been prevented “due to” alcohol consumption occurred in this younger age group.
The comparison with the group of people aged 65 and over is striking. Although the latter also have a 35% mortality rate attributable to alcohol consumption, 80% of the deaths that have been prevented due to alcohol consumption have occurred in this group.
A somewhat similar pattern emerged when researchers looked at potential years of life lost due to alcohol consumption. Of all the years of life lost, 58.4% were among those aged 20 to 49, compared with 15% among people aged 65 and over. The youngest group saw only 14.5% of years of life saved from alcohol consumption, compared to 50% in the older group.
“This study adds to the literature that questions the protective effects of alcohol on all-cause mortality,” the authors conclude. The latter, however, want to be reassuring, writing that “most of those who choose to drink can do so with relatively low risk” as long as their consumption remains moderate.
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