THURSDAY, July 10 (HealthDay News) -- Whether drinking alcohol helps or hurts your chances of avoiding heart disease and stroke may depend on your gender as well as how much you imbibe, a new study finds.
The report, which appears online July 11 in the journal Stroke, looked at the drinking habits and lifestyles of more than 80,000 Japanese men and women over a 14-year period. None had previously experienced cancer, stroke or heart disease prior to the study.
Among the findings:
"An amount of alcohol that may be beneficial for men is not good for women at all," study co-author Dr. Hiroyasu Iso, a professor of public health at Osaka University in Japan, said in an American Heart Association news release.
Iso noted that one limitation of the study is that the Japanese culture has social restrictions against women drinking as they get older, so the women who drank in the study may have had other factors that affected their heart disease and stroke risk.
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Date last updated: 11 July 2008 |