Research has shown that the harms associated with moderate or light drinking may be greater for people who are poorer or in poorer health.
The study comes just weeks after another study suggested previous research had exaggerated the benefits of alcohol and downplayed its harms.
Study co-author Dr Rosario Ortola from the Autonomous University of Madrid said that while small amounts of alcohol consumption may have some benefits for older people at high risk of cardiovascular disease, any benefits would be small and could be achieved in other ways, for example by improving diet or increasing physical activity.
“And because it's clear from the first drop that alcohol consumption is associated with an increased risk of cancer, we believe medical advice should not recommend drinking alcohol to improve health,” she said.
Ortola and colleagues report in the journal Jama Network Open how they used data provided to the UK Biobank health database by participants who enrolled between 2006 and 2010.
The researchers looked at data from 135,103 participants aged 60 and older and assigned each participant to one of four categories based on their average daily alcohol intake: “occasional drinker,” “low risk,” “moderate risk,” or “high risk.”
The “occasionally” category equates to less than a quarter of a small glass of wine per day, while “high risk” equates to at least two pints of cider per day for men and one pint for women.
The researchers then looked at which patients had died by the end of September 2021 and found a total of 15,833 deaths.
After taking into account factors such as participants' age and sex, the team found that compared with occasional drinkers, high-risk drinkers were at a 33 percent higher risk of dying from any cause during the study period, as well as a higher risk of dying from cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Moderate-risk drinking has been shown to be associated with a 10% higher risk of death from any cause and a 15% higher risk of death from cancer compared to occasional drinkers. Low-risk drinking is also associated with an 11% higher risk of death from cancer compared to occasional drinkers.
But when the team looked more closely, they found that moderate or low-risk drinking was associated with worse outcomes for people living in more deprived areas and those with poorer pre-existing health conditions.
“We believe that older adults with poorer health are more susceptible to the harmful effects of alcohol because of their higher morbidity, higher rates of use of drugs that interact with alcohol, and lower tolerance to alcohol,” Ortola said.
“There is also evidence that socio-economically disadvantaged people experience higher rates of alcohol-related harm even when consuming similar or lower amounts of alcohol, possibly due to the coexistence of other health challenges, such as unhealthy lifestyles and less access to social support and healthcare,” she said.
Perhaps surprisingly, the team found that a strong preference for wine, or drinking only with meals, may have a lower risk of death, independent of the amount of alcohol consumed, but this only applied to people in poor health or with higher deprivation.
Ortola said these results needed further investigation, but suggested they could be due to factors such as the non-alcoholic components of wine or the slower absorption of alcohol when consumed with food.
However, the study has limitations, including the fact that drinking data was based on self-reporting and the inability to demonstrate causality.
Colin Angus, a medical research fellow at the University of Sheffield who was not involved in the study, said the study provides further evidence that even light drinking increases cancer risk, but that more research is needed to prove that the link between light drinking and increased mortality is stronger in people with poorer health or lower socioeconomic status.
Angus also stressed that any findings that drinking wine confers benefits should be treated with extreme suspicion. “There is absolutely no biologically plausible evidence that drinking wine is any better for your health than any other alcohol,” he said. “What they actually found is almost certainly that wealthier people tend to drink more wine and are less likely to die young.”
