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Alcohol can act like blood thinner
Last Updated: 2005-10-24 12:43:14 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Anthony J. Brown, MD
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A few drinks of alcohol per week impairs the
ability of platelets -- elements in the blood involved in clotting -- to
turn on and clump together to form a clot, new research indicates. These
findings support previous research and may be the reason why moderate
alcohol use has been linked to a decreased risk of heart attack.
Previous reports have shown that alcohol use interferes with platelet
clumping or "aggregation", lead author Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, from the
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters Health.
"Our findings add to this by showing that such consumption also
negatively affects platelet activation," the turning on process.
The findings, which appear in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical &
Experimental Research, are based on an analysis of data from more than
3000 subjects who participated in the Framingham Offspring Study.
The subjects were surveyed with a standardized questionnaire to assess
alcohol use. Platelet activation and aggregation were assessed by
measuring the response to various clot-inducing chemicals found in the body.
Moderate alcohol use, such as three to six drinks per week, was
associated with decreased platelet activation in men. The lack of a
significant association in women was probably due inadequate numbers of
female moderate alcohol users, rather than a real difference between the
sexes, Mukamal said.
In both genders, moderate alcohol use appeared to inhibit platelet
aggregation, which is consistent with previous reports.
"The next step will be trying to correlate whether the (alcohol-induced)
change in platelet function translates into a change in the risk" of
heart attack, Mukamal said. "The Framingham study has already shown that
moderate drinkers tended to have a lower risk of heart disease."
SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, October 2005.
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