Moderate alcohol consumption is associated with reduced long-term cardiovascular risk in patients following a complicated acute myocardial infarctionInternational Journal of Cardiology Article in Press , Corrected Proof 26 Mar 2008
The impact on prognosis of alcohol use in patients with coronary artery disease remains uncertain. We related alcohol use to all-cause mortality, cardiovascular (CV)-mortality and hospitalization in patients following a complicated myocardial infarction (MI).
In the OPTIMAAL trial, 5477 patients from 7 Western European countries with heart failure and/or evidence of left ventricular dysfunction following MI were recruited. Following randomization median 3 days, patients were asked to assess their average alcohol consumption prior to the index infarction. Patients were stratified by the frequency of the use of alcohol into either non-users (n = 2160), moderate users (1–7 drinks/week, n = 2753) and heavy users (> 7 drinks/week, n = 545) and related to prespecified clinical outcomes in the groups.
A total of 5477 patients were included in the trial. During the follow-up period of 2.7 years 946 deaths were reported. Adjusted for age and smoking status, patients with moderate use of alcohol had 24% lower risk of all-cause death than abstainers. There was no significant difference between non-drinkers and heavy drinkers with regard to survival following adjustment for age and smoking status.
Our results demonstrate a strong positive association between moderate alcohol use and survival in a cohort of patients following complicated MI. Both heavy drinkers and abstainers had poorer prognosis, with no significance difference between those 2 groups.
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