A troubling report in the WSJ -- Hidden health risks for women.

I believe the article is free today; some of the key points:

Overall, science shows that for both men and women, drinking a small amount of alcohol each day is better for you than never drinking at all, and it likely lowers your risk of heart attack, diabetes and mental decline. But for women, moderate alcohol consumption also carries risks you may not know about.


Even small amounts of alcohol consumption are linked with higher risk for breast cancer. Women who drive after drinking are at higher risk than men of dying in a car accident, even at similar blood-alcohol concentrations. And women are at higher risk than men for serious health problems related to alcohol abuse, including liver, brain and heart damage.

The reasons alcohol appears to affect men and women so differently are complex. Women achieve higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood and become more impaired than men after drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol, even when taking into account differences in height and weight. This is likely due to the fact that a woman's stomach empties more slowly than a man's, giving the body more time to absorb the same amount of alcohol, many doctors say.

Lab studies suggest there may be gender differences in how alcohol affects the response to visual cues and other tasks related to driving performance, which may explain why it's more risky for a woman to drink and drive. And alcohol also may alter a woman's natural estrogen levels, which can influence her risk for a number of health concerns.

***

While there's disagreement about whether any level of alcohol is good for a woman, most authorities agree that women should limit themselves to one-half to one drink a day to get the maximum health benefits of drinking and minimize the risks. For men, the maximum health benefit comes with one to two drinks a day.

And women who do choose to drink should also take a multivitamin that contains folic acid. Recent studies show folic acid seems to blunt the harmful effects of alcohol on the breast and lowers risk of breast cancer to near that of a woman who doesn't drink alcohol.


The author is Tara Parker-Pope; in case this isn't a free feature today, you can reach her at healthjournal@wsj.com for further information.

Home page of the WSJ.

[Jenise]

Aw, poop. I don't want to hear this! Ladies, place your fingers in your ears and sing with me: la la la la la la la la la.

Since heart problems run rampant and there is no cancer at all in my family, I will continue to err on the side of drinking wine. Guess perhaps I picked my parents more wisely than I sometimes thought.

[Robin Garr]

While there's disagreement about whether any level of alcohol is good for a woman, most authorities agree that women should limit themselves to one-half to one drink a day to get the maximum health benefits of drinking and minimize the risks. For men, the maximum health benefit comes with one to two drinks a day.

Bob, as with so many health-and-alcohol studies, data fall all over the map, and this is no exception. Given the strong tendency of reporters (even for august publications) to fall into the let's-go-for-a-headline trap, I'd urge digging back to primary sources as one way to evaluate how accurately the article characterizes the research. I won't have time to look at the article until later ... is it possible to track back through it, directly or via Google, to find the actual research?

Just going by what Bob printed out (I could not find the article on today's web health site) this is another typical alarmist article, full of "may cause" and "likely do" maladies. Talk to me when you hard hard facts, WSJ.

Secondly, they lost me when they didn't even get their facts straight -- women have less alcohol dehydrogenase, which causes elevated levels even when taking weight into effect.

Finally, what are the risk levels? The press loves to twist these into alarmist numbers. If there is a one in two million risk of something, but now you drink and there is a one in a million risk, you just doubled your risk, but it is still one in a friggin' million. I'd like to see the statistics to dig out the real risks here.

I'll send the author an email and demand the backup, Robin. One really good thing about being a long time WSJ subscriber is that they will respond with whatever facts they have.

My guess is that they will get quite a bit of feedback on this article. Just to stir the pot a little more, I'm going to send a copy of the article to Dorothy J. Gaiter and ask for her comments.

I'll revert.

Regards, Bob

Randy, here's some more on the cancer/alcohol link from the article; as I mentioned to Robin, I'll ask the author for her support for the article and revert:

"One of the most troubling effects of alcohol is that even small amounts increase a woman's risk for breast cancer. A pooled analysis by Harvard researchers of all the data on alcohol and breast cancer shows that a woman's risk increases by about 9% for every 10 grams of alcohol a day that she drinks. In the U.S., the typical serving of 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of liquor delivers about 12 grams to 14 grams of alcohol, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.

That means a woman who consumes just two drinks a day has about a 27% higher risk of getting breast cancer than a woman who doesn't drink alcohol.

It's worth noting that the absolute risk of alcohol consumption to an individual woman is slight. Consider that the typical 50-year-old woman has a five-year breast-cancer risk of about 2.1% -- so two drinks a day would boost her risk to only about 2.7%.

"It's not a huge difference to an individual woman, but it could translate into many thousands of breast cancers in a year that would not have otherwise occurred," says Walter Willett, epidemiology and nutrition professor at the Harvard School for Public Health. The alcohol-health equation "is definitely more complicated in women because of the relationship with breast cancer," says Dr. Willett.

For many women, similar risks from other choices have proved unacceptable. For instance, recent studies have shown a woman's risk of breast cancer increases 9% to 24% if she uses the menopause hormones estrogen and progestin, a concern that has prompted millions of women to abandon hormone treatments for menopause.

Exactly why alcohol consumption alters a woman's breast-cancer risk isn't entirely clear. Several studies have shown that alcohol can raise a woman's natural estrogen levels, and high natural estrogen is linked with higher breast-cancer risk. Alcohol may enhance the negative effects of natural estrogen on the breast.

While the breast-cancer risk sounds scary, it has to be weighed against other health benefits of alcohol. Women who consume about one drink a day have a 40% lower risk for heart attack, and a 70% lower risk of stroke. In the well-known Nurses Health Study, which now follows more than 120,000 women, those with diabetes who drank at least a half-serving of alcohol a day had a 52% lower risk for heart attack than nondrinkers.

Studies also show that moderate alcohol use might protect against osteoporosis, a serious health problem that leads to brittle bones and risky fractures and affects far more women than men. Women who drink six to seven servings of alcohol a week typically have higher bone density than nondrinkers. The higher bone density is likely explained by the estrogen-enhancing effects of alcohol, doctors say.

As a result, women need to take into account family history and personal concerns. A woman with a strong family history of breast cancer or someone with a family history of alcoholism might decide to forgo alcohol altogether. But someone without those added risk factors who is worried about heart attack, diabetes or osteoporosis might consider drinking small amounts of alcohol daily.

Regards, Bob

Thanks, Bob.

I sent off the two emails, Randy; thanks for the factual inaccuracy. Here's the email to Gaiter and Becher:

Hi, I sent the following email to Tara Parker-Pope today -- do you agree with the conclusions and do they affect the advice you would give to women you encourage to drink wine?

Thanks, Bob

I was troubled by your article on alcohol today at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1167084 ... side_today

Could you give me the citations to the research you relied on?

I understood that women women have less alcohol dehydrogenase, which causes elevated levels even when taking weight into effect.

Do you have any idea what Dorothy J. Gaiter thinks of this piece?

Regards, Robert C. Ross
[Address deleted.]
robcurtross@hotmail.com

Let's see how they respond. Regards, Bob

The lower level in women of alcohol dehydrogenase may be a postive feature rather than a bug (to put it in software engineering terms). Yes, it means more ethanol in the blood for longer, but it also means less acetaldehyde in the blood. Ethanol detoxification is a two-stage process. The first liver enzyme is alcohol dehydrogenase, which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde. The second enzyme is aldehyde dehyrodgenase, which converts acetaldehyde to acetate, which then enters the central metabolic energy-producing system. The problem is, aldehyde dehydrogenase acts more slowly than alcohol dehydrogenase, so if there's a lot of excess ethanol present, you get a build-up of acetaldehyde. The excess eventually gets dumped into the bloodstream. Acetaldehyde is to blame for many of the toxic symptoms of a hangover. So if you have less active alcohol dehydrogenase, the result is you get drunk faster and stay drunk longer, but you don't suffer as much from hangovers.

I've noticed this on several occasions where I've been part of a group of over-indulgers. The men were all completely wiped out the next day, whereas the women, who had drunk just as much (if not more), were seemingly unaffected. But the women had gotten schnockered first.

It's not clear to me where the trade-off is between having more ethanol present in the bloodstream, versus being protected against the toxic effects of acetaldehyde.

-Paul W.

Good point, Paul.

While there's disagreement about whether any level of alcohol is good for a woman, most authorities agree that women should limit themselves to one-half to one drink a day to get the maximum health benefits of drinking and minimize the risks. For men, the maximum health benefit comes with one to two drinks a day.

Bob, as with so many health-and-alcohol studies, data fall all over the map, and this is no exception. Given the strong tendency of reporters (even for august publications) to fall into the let's-go-for-a-headline trap, I'd urge digging back to primary sources as one way to evaluate how accurately the article characterizes the research. I won't have time to look at the article until later ... is it possible to track back through it, directly or via Google, to find the actual research?

hear, hear.

Always reach back for the source on stories like this. Did I say ALWAYS?

I have decided to take all of these reports with a grain of salt. Now that I have passed the half-century mark, I have accumulated enough conflicting data and reports to thoroughly confuse me. That is primarily because professional medical opinions change course more often than a battleship being chased by a submarine. First, we're supposed to eat low-fat. Then we're supposed to eat low-carb. Then its low protein. In addition, when you get into the details, you find that some lab rat was fed, in a single day, a quantity that represents a million times his normal lifetime consumption.

I fully expect to read or hear someday that saliva causes cancer.

Keep in mind that birth is the leading cause of death. There's a nearly 100% correlation there (the exceptions being a few biblical figures).

-Paul W.

[James Roscoe]

Keep in mind that birth is the leading cause of death. There's a nearly 100% correlation there (the exceptions being a few biblical figures).

-Paul W.

I think I might be a Biblical figure!

Keep in mind that birth is the leading cause of death. There's a nearly 100% correlation there (the exceptions being a few biblical figures).

-Paul W.

I have a friend who told his older brother that if he didn't stop smoking he would die. His brother shot back, "...and you aren't going to die???"