Heavy drinking risky for women’s heart

Boston, December 3: Next time you toast a glass, be resolute to adhere to limits, for a new study suggests that sipping onto more than two alcoholic drinks a day may boost up the risk of atrial fibrillationdefine, the most common type of heart rhythm disturbance.

While the risk was already established among men, the fairer sex too now falls in the same bracket, researchers highlighted. However, healthy middle-age women who boozed less than two per day are apparently unaffected, the researchers averred.

The 12-year long study, which reports its findings in the December 3 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is based on assessment of over 34,000 women aged around 45.

Through questionnaires, researchers kept track of the alcohol consumption for each participant; first at start of study and then 4 years later. All participants were medically healthy at the start of the study.

However, follow-up analysis revealed 1.9 percent of the women, who either abstained from alcohol or had less than one drink per day, to have developed atrial fibrillationdefine, compared to 1.8 percent in the ‘1-2 drinks a day’ bracket and 2.9 percent in ‘2 or more a day’ group.

Although initially the irregular heart rhythm was self-reported, they were later confirmed through an electrocardiogram (ECGdefine).

While "Small to moderate amounts of alcohol -- up to two drinks a day -- do not appear to be associated with an increased risk," Dr. Christine Albert of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School asserted, but a daily intake of over two drinks may boost the risk by almost 50 percent.

Atrial fibrillation is a phase of cardiacdefine arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) typically inflicted by the disturbances in the two upper chambers of the heart. Typical indication of atrial fibrillation is irregular or missed heartbeat often observed through pulse reading. A conclusive indication is, however, an electrocardiogram (ECG).

Although atrial fibrillation is asymptomatic and is not a life-threatening condition in itself, it can turn chronic, thus leading to palpitations, chest pain, and congestive heart failure, conditions that might prove fatal.