Heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers

[dctoedt]

Reminds me of an old Willie Nelson song, "I Gotta Get Drunk," with the lines: "There's a lot of doctors that tell me / that I'd better start slowin' it down, / But there's more old drunks, than there are old doctors, / So I guess we'd better have another round."

[dododo]

title of paper is: "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1530-0277.201...

in particular, they are looking whether some 55-65 year olds died the next 20 years, women were underrepresented in their sample (just 37%) who tend to be lighter drinkers anyhow [citation needed]. participants were select by having been at a health care facility in the last 3 years. the socioeconomic factors they took into account where those at the start ("at baseline"). i.e., who knows what changed in the past or future, or why they were in a health care center, etc. was there an observation effect? who knows.

the yahoo article doesn't seem to represent this very well. hype hype hype

[gary201147]

Doesnt this exclude heavy drinkers who died before the age of 55-65? This skews the results towards individuals whose bodies are presumably quite resilient against alcohol related health complications and managed to keep the person alive long enough to be included in this study. The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"

[nandemo]

The study is about a population aged between 55 and 65 and what happens to them in the following 20 years according to their drinking patterns. So it's not fair to say that the results are skewed. It only excludes 40-year-old drunks in a trivial way: the study is not about them.

Analogy: suppose we have a study about the effect of using or not using sunscreen on a Caucasian population. It wouldn't be fair to say that the results are skewed just because they didn't include non-Caucasians.

>The title should read something more akin to "Late life heavy drinkers outlive late life nondrinkers"

Indeed, the title of the paper is "Late-life alcohol consumption and 20-Year mortality".

I understand it's normal to be skeptical of whether the results apply to younger people but, as someone else mentioned, I doubt that so many alcoholics die before 55. There's probably also some practical difficulty of doing an analog study for a younger range.

[jamesseda]

Did they verify non drinkers are non drinkers? My Doctor friend tells me that she is amazed at how many people when asked if they drink, emphatically say "Never".

[maxawaytoolong]

Cognitive dissonance is widespread. An old roommate once informed me she had given up drinking, because she switched from vodka crans to wine. It's similar to vegetarians who sometimes eat chicken and people who "don't watch TV" because all the shows they watch are on Hulu.

[GFischer]

Well, some of us actually -never- drink.

I personally don't like the taste, nor the side effects - I wish alcohol was the social grease it's touted as, but for me it's only bad side effects.

Nobody in my family drinks (as in, you won't find a single alcoholic beverage at a Christmas party or weekend barbecue for example), and my current girlfriend was a very casual drinker and has quit since she started dating me.

[kscaldef]

Many of the surveys I've seen in doctors offices & similar don't distinguish well between "almost never" and "never". I know a fair number of people in my family are in the "almost never" category. They might have a glass of wine at Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, but that's about it. I don't know what they tell their doctors, but given the usual checkboxes for frequency of alcohol consumption, "never" is probably what I'd select.

[garret]

I would guess that the more a person drinks, past a certain point, the more likely they are to lie about it.

[dododo]

they used self-reported but cite four studies case where in slightly older populations self-reporting is deemed accurate.

see section "Materials and methods" subsection "Baseline Alcohol consumption" in the linked paper.

[rcthompson]

What the study actually finds is that heavy drinkers who live to age 55 live longer than nondrinkers who live to age 55. This might be because heavy drinking confers some health benefit, or some behavioral benefit (couch surfing vs outdoor activity). But to me, the more likely explanation is that heavy drinking selects for people who are genetically or otherwise predisposed to live longer (by killing the rest before age 55).

Imagine a headline that read "Smoking correlates with increased life expectancy among centenarians." You probably wouldn't conclude based on that that smoking is a good idea.

[jamesbritt]

    Imagine a headline that read "Smoking correlates with increased life expectancy among centenarians." 

On aside topic, I've heard from three different people (each around 60) that they plan on taking up smoking (cigars, at least, in one case) when the reach 70 or 80.

Interesting idea. Me, I'm so glad to be free of the headaches of maintaining a smoking habit I can't see ever going back, even if any health risk was irrelevant.

[barrkel]

Do enough heavy drinkers really die by 55 to account for the difference?

[sounddust]

Sorry to post this is off-topic, but am I the only one who is incredibly annoyed by the way Time slips in promotions for other content in the middle of their articles? It's quite jarring and makes it difficult to keep one's attention on the content. And the fact that it happens on almost every paragraph just makes me more and more frustrated until I have no desire to read the article anymore. Unfortunately, readability doesn't help here; anyone know of a user script or other way to easily fix this?

[deno]

CTRL+SHIFT+J (JS console) and type:

  Array.prototype.forEach.apply(document.getElementsByClassName('see'), [function(el){el.style.display = 'none'}])

[carbocation]

This is a restatement of what we've puzzled over for some time now: that those who consume modest amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk of mortality.

It's an epidemiologic association, so this isn't something you can exactly hang your hat on and encourage people to do. But it has been observed that cardiovascular risk is lowest for women who have just under 1 drink per day, and men who have 2 or fewer per day.

This reinforces the older literature, but doesn't really help illuminate the causal chain, if any.

(Edit - as sp332 points out below, this does present new data about an association between heavy drinking and reduced mortality in this cohort.)

[sp332]

What's new is that, in this study, heavy drinkers outlived abstainers. Very unexpected, even though I knew that moderate drinkers had some health benefits.

[secretasiandan]

I don't think your summary is quite correct

"abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers."

"Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk."

Side question : For your statement about men, is that just under 2 a day or less than 2 a day?

[compay]

Perhaps it's because the heaviest drinkers spend many evenings safely at home passed out on the couch, while the abstainers are out incurring the normal risks of daily life.

[tkhoven]

controlling for nearly all imaginable variables - socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on

It's been a while since statistics 101, and I'm curious - in practice, how do you control for these variables? Do you try for a large sample size and only compare like with like? Or do you try to estimate the impact of the confounding variables and adjust the numbers accordingly?

[SebMortelmans]

This is so skewed. 1800 participants, all with different health backgrounds, then divided into 3 groups of heavy, moderate and never. That's not really a sample size to get any definite conclusion from. These results might be a reason to do a more trough research at the most.

The variance on this thing is huge. To tie their drinking habits to their mortality, negating all other factors, on this sample size, is ridiculous.

[Retric]

A sample size of 1800 / 3 where 40+% of them died is actually a fairly good for this type of research. The only real value for a larger sample size is the ability to measure smaller effects. And if the change is tiny then it's not really significant anyway.

[kwantam]

"Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk..., heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk."

Hmm, seems to me that all have precisely the same likelihood of dying.

Sorry to be snarky, but this is just awfully poor editing. Reading pop science reporting is often just painful.

[code_duck]

My theory:

absolute non drinkers are uptight,

and heavy drinkers are pickled and preserved.

My grandfather just died at the age of 97 and he was never without a 'snort', aka Coke and Canadian Velvet. He was quite normal up to about 95, and never had any serious ailments.

[Perceval]

Guess I'm going to die early.

[ryandvm]

I'll drink to that.

jk

[jolie]

Meh. I'm much happier with my non-drinking quality of life as opposed to my former heavy-drinking quality of life. I'd give a few years up to live drama-free for the remainder.

[vishaldpatel]

I think it'd be better to check out drinking habits of aged Japanese to figure out whats a good level =)

[sutro]

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.

[c00p3r]

Nothing to see here. Abstinence is a much more stress and discomfort than drinking, especially when you suddenly stop after years of a heavy daily consumption. It is extremely difficult thing to change your habits because you will face a completely different, unfriendly (literally - you will lose most of your connections when you stop - no one need a stressed/depressed and sick neurotic) world, which you need to learn to comprehend and love again. The same type, but more intensive struggle awaits you after a sudden withdraw from a dope addiction - the world will be alien to you. The problem with a booze or dope isn't about chemistry or organic damages, it is all about losing a connection with reality and the shock and discomfort to rediscover it after withdrawal. Abstinence is worse than drinking, every drunkard or doper will tell you. Even after years, if you can stay away from it, each day will be a new challenge, new struggle. And each regression will drop you back below the zero. This is the thing that kills you faster than booze itself.

btw, the only way out which may work more or less is about getting your mind stimulated and busy - traveling to the different part of the world (India and Muslim countries are the best), some hobby or business. There are a lot of life-beaten people who are traveling - running away from their past and from themselves. Especially in India.

[rubashov]

I would bet the effect is simply due to heart attack deaths. Heart attacks are the #2 killer. Alcohol improves circulation and ameliorates heart disease.

I bet if you controlled for triglycerides or waist to hip ratio the alcohol has no effect.

In short, if you are going to be fat and coat your arteries with crap from a sugary and vegetable oil heavy diet, then make sure to have a couple drinks a day. That category happens to cover most people in the industrialized world.