One glass of wine a night increases your risk of STROKE, new research shows

While it’s news to no-one that too much alcohol causes long term health problems, conventional wisdom was that just one glass of wine or beer shouldn’t do any harm.

In fact, we’ve long been taught that a glass of red wine a day could actually be good for us.

Sadly, new research has now challenged that, showing that just one or two alcoholic drinks a night significantly increases the risk of suffering a stroke in later life.

Scientists at Oxford university found that one or two drinks a day increased the risk of suffering a stroke in the next ten years by 10 to 15 per cent, and four drinks a day by 35 per cent.

Thanks to a pioneering method which used genetic data to remove some of the plausible other factors in previous large health studies, the researchers are confident their new research shows their are no health benefits to ‘moderate’ drinking. 

The team drew on health, lifestyle and genetic data collected from more than half a million adults in China between 2004 and 2008.

Participants were followed until the start of 2017 and the team looked at the occurrence of conditions including heart attack and stroke from medical records.  

At first glance, the results appeared to find a protective effect against stroke for those drinking about 100g of alcohol a week – about four large glasses of wine.

 

After using genetic data from a smaller group of participants and taking into account where they lived to predict the amount of alcohol men were consuming, researchers found no protective effect from moderate drinking.

Instead, for every additional 280g of alcohol consumed per week, the total stroke risk was raised by 38%.

One of the study’s authors professor Sir Richard Peto explained: “Even moderate alcohol consumption increases the chances of having a stroke.”

He added: “The findings for heart attack were less clear-cut, so we plan to collect more evidence.”

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