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(Circulation. 2002;106:1465.)
© 2002 American Heart Association, Inc.
Clinical Investigation and Reports |
From the Laboratoire du Stress Cardiovasculaire et Pathologies Associées, Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, France (M.d.L., P.S., F.B., J.d.L.); Unité dEpidémiologie de lINRETS, Lyon, France (J.L.M.); and Département de Cardiologie, CHU-Hôpital Pontchaillou, Rennes, France (F.P.).
Correspondence to Dr M de Lorgeril, Laboratoire du Stress Cardiovasculaire et Pathologies Associées, UFR de Médecine et Pharmacie, Domaine de la Merci, 38706 La Tronche (Grenoble), France. E-mail michel.delorgeril{at}ujf-grenoble.fr
| Abstract |
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Methods and Results In survivors of a recent AMI, we analyzed the association between ethanol intake and the risk of recurrence. The patients were classified according to the amount of ethanol that they consumed regularly during follow-up. Major prognostic factors, including the severity of the prior AMI and drug treatment, were recorded and included in the analyses. Only patients with at least 2 reliable assessments of drinking (and dietary) habits were included (n=437). The average ethanol intake was 7.6% of the total energy intake, wherein wine ethanol represented 92% of the total. Among these patients, 104 cardiovascular complications occurred during a mean follow-up period of 4 years. In comparison with abstainers, the adjusted risk of complications was reduced by 59% (95% confidence interval: 17 to 80) in patients whose average ethanol intake was 7.7% of the total energy intake (about 2 drinks/day), and by 52% (95% confidence interval: 4 to 76) in those whose average ethanol intake was of 16% of energy (about 4 drinks/day).
Conclusion Whereas moderate wine drinking was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of complications in this homogenous population of coronary heart disease patients, further studies are required to confirm the data, define the clinical and biological profile of the patients who would most benefit from wine drinking after recent AMI, and examine whether the relations found are due to ethanol or other wine ingredients.
Key Words: alcohol coronary disease myocardial infarction prevention diet
| Introduction |
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The aim of this study, which was conducted on survivors of a recent AMI, was to examine the association between habitual ethanol intake and the risk of CVD complications. The main prognostic factors and potential confounders, such as smoking, severity of the prior AMI, drug treatment, and dietary habits were carefully evaluated and included in the analyses.
| Methods |
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The methods used for the validation and classification of the complications have been reported.14 Only those clinical events requiring admission to the coronary care unit and invasive investigations such as coronary angiography were retained. An independent Endpoint Committee blinded to patients group assignment validated and classified the endpoints out of the raw data obtained from hospital files. The main risk factors of coronary heart disease (CHD), including blood pressure and blood lipids, were assessed at randomization. Other prognostic factors or potential confounders (eg, smoking and drug treatment) were also recorded at randomization and during follow-up. The diet evaluation comprised a 24-hour recall and a frequency questionnaire. Alcohol consumption was estimated in the same way to obtain detailed data about the frequency, amount, and type of alcohol drinks usually consumed. For each patient, the ethanol intake per 24 hours was calculated in energy and converted into a percent contribution to the total energy intake. This way of normalization was preferred to control for variations in body mass index, lifestyle (physical exercise and energy expenditure), and dietary factors (energy intake) that potentially confound the associations between ethanol intake and the risk of CHD.15,16 To provide clinically meaningful information, an optimal classification (an optimal indicator of exposure) would be on the basis of serial measurements of ethanol intake over the entire period of follow-up. Thus, the patients were classified according to their habitual consumption of ethanol during follow-up. Only patients with at least 2 reliable assessments of their drinking habits were retained. In case of a major discrepancy between the different visits (in case of irregular or binge drinking, for instance), patients were excluded from analysis (n=35). Because the few women (n=49) with available data showed a wide variation in ethanol intake throughout follow-up, thus entailing a risk of misclassification, and also because they were not equally distributed into the 4 quartiles, they were all excluded from this analysis. Using the calculated mean consumption of ethanol, patients were categorized into quartiles of ethanol consumption. Zero percent of energy intake per day derived from ethanol (non-drinkers) was quartile 1, <5.41% of total energy intake per day was quartile 2, >5.41 but <9.84% of energy was quartile 3, and >9.84% of energy was quartile 4. Thus, patients categorized as non-drinkers (quartile 1) were total and permanent abstainers during the entire follow-up.
Statistical Analysis
The Cox proportional hazards model was used to quantify the associations between habitual ethanol intake and the rate of recurrences. A composite outcome as previously described14 was used, and it included the primary endpoints of the Lyon trial (cardiac death and nonfatal AMI), the major secondary endpoints (episodes of unstable angina or overt heart failure, stroke, and pulmonary embolism), and the other secondary endpoints (recurrent angina, surgical or medical revascularization procedures, post-angioplasty restenosis, and thrombophlebitis). The censoring date for each patient was the date of the earliest primary (if any) or secondary endpoint event. Risk ratios were calculated by comparing the frequency of the endpoints in the patients of quartiles 2 through 4 with that in the reference quartile (quartile 1, non-drinkers) and were adjusted for the diet group assignment. They were also computed with multivariate proportional hazards models controlling simultaneously for diet group assignment, age, and current smoking. The reported risk ratios were not adjusted for several predictors of CVD complications affected by ethanol consumption (namely high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, body mass index, triglycerides, blood glucose) because those are effects of exposure and should not be controlled.4,15 Because of the importance of blood pressure and total cholesterol as major risk factors in secondary prevention,14 however, these 2 variables were included in the multivariate model.
| Results |
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During a mean follow-up of 4 years, 104 complications occurred. All but 9 (1 cerebral stroke, 1 peripheral embolism, and 7 episodes of overt heart failure) were CHD recurrences. There were 4 deaths, 14 recurrent AMIs, and 15 episodes of unstable angina. There were also 24 episodes of recurrent angina that required admission to the coronary care unit but did not fully meet the criteria for AMI or unstable angina, as previously defined.14 Finally, there were 17 cases of postangioplasty restenosis, and 21 patients needed myocardial revascularization (bypass surgery in 3 cases and coronary angioplasty in 18 cases). There were 36, 34, 18, and 16 complications in the quartiles 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively, and we found a significant inverse trend across ethanol intake categories in the diet-adjusted models (P=0.01, Table 4). In comparison with the abstainer group, the risk of recurrence was lower among the patients whose ethanol intake was about 7.7% (quartile 3, about 2 drinks per day) or 16% (quartile 4, an average of 4 to 5 drinks per day) of the total energy intake (Figure). Control for potential confounders in multivariate analysis only slightly changed the risk ratios (Table 4). Inclusion of AMI severity measures (Table 3) in the model did not substantially change the results. Analyses were repeated including only the 42 hard endpoints (death, AMI, cerebral stroke, pulmonary embolism, and unstable angina). This analysis provided similar trends as those reported with the 104 complications. Despite the small number of cases (8 and 7 cases in quartiles 3 and 4 versus 11 and 16 in quartile 1 and 2), the risk ratios were 0.65 and 0.69 after adjusting only for diet (P=0.01) when comparing the quartiles 3 and 4 with the reference quartile 1, and 0.53 and 0.58 after multiple adjustments (P=0.07).
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| Discussion |
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To help to solve this important question, and because wine trials are not feasible, it is important to design studies that measure and control for the main lifestyle and health confounders of the association between wine ethanol and CHD. One solution is to study this association in the context of secondary prevention, where the conventional risk factors of CHD and the main prognostic factors are, in principle, systematically measured. The data on secondary prevention of CHD, however, are limited and conflicting.8,1013 Thun et al8 reported that the adjusted death rates from CHD were 30% to 40% lower among men with preexisting CHD who reported at least 1 drink daily than among non-drinkers, whereas Shaper and Wannamethee12 found that regular ethanol drinking in men with established CHD was not associated with any significant benefit for CHD as compared with occasional drinking. On the other hand, Muntwyler et al11 reported that in a large cohort of middle-aged men with a history of myocardial infarction, there was a reduction of total and CVD mortality with alcohol consumption, the maximum apparent benefit (a 24% reduction of CVD mortality) coming from 2 to 6 drinks per week. The surprising features of the results by Muntwyler et al were that risk reduction was more apparent for non-cardiovascular rather than CVD mortality.23 Unfortunately, most studies of patients with known CHD did not include information about the severity of CHD and other major prognostic cofactors and potential confounders, such as medicines and habitual diet, and an insufficient control of these factors may have affected the overall findings of the studies. It should also be noted that the main alcoholic beverage drunk by British or US patients was not wine, and that assessments of ethanol intake and other confounders were mostly made on the basis of a single measurement, which may have resulted in either misclassification over time or an underestimation of the effect of certain factors, including ethanol drinking.4,22
For these reasons, the Lyon trial14 offered the unique opportunity to examine the association between wine drinking and the risk of CVD complications in a very homogeneous cohort of French middle-aged male survivors of a recent AMI. The study included repeated measures of a number of risk and prognosis factors in secondary prevention of CHD, with a careful assessment of lifestyle and dietary factors. The results show that moderate wine drinking was associated with a significant decrease in the risk of CVD complications. The inverse relation between wine drinking and the risks seemed to be independent of the major predictors of CVD, including the conventional risk factors (smoking, cholesterol, and blood pressure), the severity of the prior AMI, drug treatment, and dietary habits. The homogeneity of that population, with a narrow age range, no women, a small number of heavy drinkers, no binge or irregular drinkers, and the fact that the drinkers consumed almost exclusively wine (which accounted for more than 90% of the ethanol consumed), is an important factor supporting the results of this study.
Our findings do have potential limitations. First, the sample size and total number of events were rather small (the counterpart of studying a very homogeneous population), and the data have to be confirmed in large-scale studies. It is noteworthy, however, that in a recent meta-analysis involving more than 200 000 persons, an inverse relationship was found between wine drinking and vascular diseases.24 Second, we do not have information regarding the drinking habits before AMI, whereas abstainers before AMI were shown to be at particularly high risk.13 It is clear, however, that it is the way of drinking after and not before AMI that is potentially protective during the follow-up. Third, a great deal of prudence is required when attempting to extent our results to other groups, including women, young people (below 45 years of age), or elderly people (over 75 years of age), to the context of primary prevention, or to other alcoholic beverages and drinking patterns. Finally, because of the use of strict exclusion criteria in the Lyon trial and because some patients were lost to follow-up very early, in particular because of early CVD complication, and were excluded from this analysis in the absence of 2 reliable assessments of drinking habits, the studied cohort was at rather low risk and probably not representative of the average post-AMI patients. Caution is therefore required before making recommendations for secondary prevention in general, and further studies are warranted to better define the clinical and biological profile of the patients who would most benefit from moderate wine drinking after AMI. Because essentially all alcohol consumed by these patients was in the form of wine, our data cannot cast light on the specificity of any apparent benefit from non-alcoholic wine ingredients.
In conclusion, despite a small sample size, this investigation suggests that in a very homogeneous population of patients with established CHD, after controlling for many potential confounders, wine drinking is associated with a reduced risk of CVD complications after a recent AMI. Further studies are required to confirm the data, however, and to examine whether the relations found are due to ethanol or to other wine ingredients.
Received April 8, 2002; revision received June 26, 2002; accepted June 26, 2002.
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