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Thursday, September 13, 2007

[Commentary] DO THE PROTECTIVE EFFECTS FADE AWAY?
Addiction 102 (10), 1586–1587.




If nothing positive could be said about alcohol, life would be much easier for health educators, physicians and public health officers. Their messages are undermined by findings about the protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption.

The credibility of these findings is therefore of considerable practical interest. As usual in epidemiological research, scientists try to eliminate bias, confounding and measurement error as much as possible. Nevertheless, the protective effect of alcohol on coronary heart disease incidence and all-cause mortality has remained. All but one meta-analysis agree on this point. The deviant one found no protection, but was shown to have errors in the selection of studies and interpretation of findings .

A new input to the body of available evidence on the protective effect is published in this issue.
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