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WEDNESDAY, June 11, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Pre-menopausal women who drink a glass or two of wine or beer a day could significantly reduce their risk for type 2 diabetes, a new Harvard study claims.
Studying the effects of drinking various levels of alcohol, as well as differentiating between beer, wine and hard liquor consumption in a group of more than 100,000 women aged 25 to 42, the researchers found: Light drinking of wine and beer seems to have a protective effect on the women's risk for type 2 diabetes. Drinking hard liquor was not as beneficial.
"There are better preventive measures to lower the risk for type 2 diabetes, like not smoking and increasing physical activity -- obesity is the overwhelming risk factor for the disease. But it appears that light to moderate drinking of wine or beer has a protective effect," says study co-author Goya Wannamethee.
The results of the study, which was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, appear in the June 9 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
What makes this study unique is the population it studied and the depth with which it assessed the effects of different libations, says Wannamethee, who worked on the research last year during a sabbatical at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has since returned to her position as a research fellow in epidemiology at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London.
"Lots of studies have suggested that alcohol has a protective effect, but this is one of the first to look at younger women and go into the patterns of drinking and types of alcohol," she says.
Dr. Joseph Giangola, medical director of the Hackensack University Medical Center's Molly Diabetes Center in New Jersey, says, "This study provides interesting data, but the natural conclusion that people reach is, 'Let's go out and have a drink.' "
"Instead, I would rest on other large studies, where we know for certain that increasing physical activity and reducing weight are the best ways of reducing risk for diabetes," Giangola says.
For the new study, researchers used data from the Nurses' Health Study II, a national study started in 1989 to look at risk factors for major chronic diseases for women. Data from detailed health questionnaires about weight, diet, smoking, physical activity levels, family history of diabetes and alcohol consumption were filled out by 101,690 healthy women, analyzed and compared to similar data a decade later.
Over the period of the study, 935 of the women were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a low number that reflects the low incidence of the disease in younger women, Wannamethee says.
After adjusting for other health factors such as smoking and physical activity, researchers found women who were light to moderate drinkers, which was classified as drinking one or two drinks daily, had a lower risk of developing the illness compared to women who didn't drink. Of interest was that the risk-reduction benefits of wine drinking seemed significantly higher than from drinking hard liquor.
The women who drank between one or two glasses of wine daily had a 40 percent reduction in risk for developing type 2 diabetes, compared to those who drank no wine. Those who drank a similar amount of beer had a 30 percent reduction in risk. Drinking the same amount of hard liquor did not bring a similar benefit -- only a 20 percent reduction of risk.
Further, while those women who reported drinking more than two glasses or wine or beer daily still had a 22 percent reduction in risk for developing type 2 diabetes compared to non-drinkers, those who drank more than two drinks of hard liquor more than doubled their risk for the illness, the researchers found.
"The numbers are small, and we cannot say with certainty that the effects of wine are actually different from spirits in having an effect of lowering insulin level or other biological factors relating to diabetes," Wannamethee says.
"The greater reduction seen for wine may be due to differences in lifestyle characteristics, which we weren't able to adjust adequately in the multivariate model," Wannamethee says. Wine drinkers reported a healthier lifestyle -- thinner, non-smoking, more physically active and better educated -- than those who drank beer or hard liquor, she adds.
Another reason for the lesser effects of hard liquor, Wannamethee says, could be that the small number of hard liquor drinkers in the study were quite heavy drinkers and had a much higher total alcohol intake than the heavy beer and wine drinkers.
Since 1991, there has been a 61 percent increase in diabetes, a jump that mirrors a 74 percent increase in obesity in the United States. The two health problems are closely related. There are now an estimated 17 million people with the disease in this country, according to The National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse.
More information
For more facts on pre-menopausal women and diabetes, you can visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse offers a thorough explanation of diabetes.
