Alcohol consumption and cardiovascular disease, cancer, injury, admission to hospital, and mortality: a prospective cohort study

Publication date: Available online 17 September 2015 Source:The Lancet Author(s): Andrew Smyth, Koon K Teo, Sumathy Rangarajan, Martin O'Donnell, Xiaohe Zhang, Punam Rana, Darryl P Leong, Gilles Dagenais, Pamela Seron, Annika Rosengren, Aletta E Schutte, Patricio Lopez-Jaramillo, Ayetkin Oguz, Jephat Chifamba, Rafael Diaz, Scott Lear, Alvaro Avezum, Rajesh Kumar, Viswanathan Mohan, Andrzej Szuba, Li Wei, Wang Yang, Bo Jian, Martin McKee, Salim Yusuf Background Alcohol consumption is proposed to be the third most important modifiable risk factor for death and disability. However, alcohol consumption has been associated with both benefits and harms, and previous studies were mostly done in high-income countries. We investigated associations between alcohol consumption and outcomes in a prospective cohort of countries at different economic levels in five continents. Methods We included information from 12 countries participating in the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study, a prospective cohort study of individuals aged 35–70 years. We used Cox proportional hazards regression to study associations with mortality (n=2723), cardiovascular disease (n=2742), myocardial infarction (n=979), stroke (n=817), alcohol-related cancer (n=764), injury (n=824), admission to hospital (n=8786), and for a composite of these outcomes (n=11 963). Findings We included 114 970 adults, of whom 12 904 (11%) were from high...
Source: The Lancet - Category: Journals (General) Source Type: research