Link Between Wine and Heart Disease Prevention - Study Highlights

Drinking a small or moderate amount of wine may lower the risk of serious cardiovascular disease in people at a higher risk who are following a Mediterranean diet, according to research published in the European Heart Journal.

The new research is part of a larger Spanish study investigating the effect of a Mediterranean diet on people with a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease. All the people taking part had no cardiovascular disease at the start of the study, but they either had type-2 diabetes, or they had a combination of cardiovascular disease risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, being overweight and/or a family history of cardiovascular disease.

As well as completing questionnaires about what they ate and drank, participants gave urine samples at the beginning of the study and after a year of following a Mediterranean diet. To investigate the effect of drinking wine, researchers included a total of 1,232 participants. Participants were followed up for four to five years and during that time, there were 685 cases of cardiovascular disease during the study.

In this group of people at high risk of cardiovascular disease who were following a Mediterranean diet, researchers found that the risk of developing a cardiovascular event was reduced by 50% in light-to-moderate wine drinkers, defined as consuming half to one glass of wine per day, compared to those drinking very little or no wine. Light drinking (between one glass per week and less than half a glass per day) reduced cardiovascular risk by 38%. However, this protective effect disappears in people who drank more than one glass per day.

The researchers took account of other factors that are known to influence the risk of cardiovascular disease, but they acknowledge that the design of the study means it can only show a link between drinking wine and cardiovascular events, and other factors cannot be ruled out.

Reference: Inés Domínguez-López, Rosa M Lamuela-Raventós, Cristina Razquin, Camila Arancibia-Riveros, Polina Galkina, Jordi Salas-Salvadó, Ángel M Alonso-Gómez, Montserrat Fitó, Miquel Fiol, José Lapetra, Enrique Gómez-Gracia, José V Sorlí, Miguel Ruiz-Canela, Olga Castañer, Liming Liang, Lluis Serra-Majem, Frank B Hu, Emilio Ros, Miguel Ángel Martínez-González, Ramon Estruch, Urinary tartaric acid as a biomarker of wine consumption and cardiovascular risk: the PREDIMED trial, European Heart Journal, 2024;, ehae804, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehae804