Alcohol Consumption: Women Are More Prone To Heart Attacks Than Men, Say Scientists

An excessive intake of alcohol can affect the hearts of elderly women of over 75 years. The over indulgence of alcohol is two times more toxic for women as it is for men, according to scientists.

Harvard Medical School recently performed an experiment on 4,466 people, in association with its second largest teaching affiliate, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The average age of the people in this experiment was 76 years old.

The male participants in the study were instructed to have 14 alcoholic beverages for a week. The researchers observed slight enlargements in the pumping chambers of hearts of the male participants, as reported in American Heart Association’s website.

Female respondents were asked to have a single drink every day for a week. After a week, when the researchers carried out echocardiograms of their hearts, they found that the women participants also had similar enlargement in the pumping chambers of their hearts.

“In spite of potential benefits of low alcohol intake, our findings highlight the possible hazards to cardiac structure and function by increased amounts of alcohol consumption in the elderly, particularly among women. This reinforces the U.S. recommendations stating that those who drink should do so with moderation,” Dr. Alexandra Gonçalves, a cardiologist and postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was quoted in the American Heart Association’s journal.

Alcoholism is considered as the main cause of dilated cardiomyopathy. A typical heart muscle disease, cardiomyopathy is the deterioration of cardiac muscle or myocardium’s ability to contract. Finally, this contraction disability leads to heart failure. The excess of alcohol in the blood stream increases the chances of early death of heart muscle cells.

Earlier researchers believed for a long time that drinking alcohol, based on the quantity consumed, had some good or ill-effects on the heart. However, the recent research on both males and females dictates moderate drinking for everyone. This can protect persons from various types of heart-related troubles. The American Heart Association guidelines state that moderate drinking usually means two drinks (beer, wine or liquor) a day for men and one drink a day for women.

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