Heavy drinking kills the heart
Although alcohol abuse is not good for anyone at all, it is especially dangerous for men with high blood pressure or hypertension.
Six or more drinks at once increase the risk of heart-related death more than four times to patients with severe hypertension compared with the blood pressure of the non drinkers as Dr. Heechoul Ohrr of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea says. The October issue of Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association says that more than twelve drinks at a time increase the risk of dying from cardiovascular accidents 13 times if combined with severe hypertension. The heart problems risk associated with heavy drinking is quite small, around 0.2 percent per year for nondrinkers without hypertension compared to 2.7 percent per year for heavy drinkers with grade 3 hypertension, as Dr. Brian Silver of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit says. He continued declaring that everyone should keep their drinking habits under control especially when they have a very high blood pressure. In this case, the consumption of alcohol should be very carefully be kept under control.
The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends a maximum of two drinks per day for men and one for women for the ones that choose to drink. Heavy drinking is not that common in the United States as it is in South Korea, and Ohrr says that almost half of the adult men drink excessively at least once a week and so do 9.2 percent of women. The study was performed on more than 6,100 residents of an agricultural community in South Korea for 20.8 years. The adults, who were older than 55 years, contained 15.5 percent of men with normal blood pressure and 17.8 percent of men with high blood pressure that declared themselves heavy drinkers (six or more drinks at the same time) while 3.1 percent and 3.9 percent sais that they have more than 12 drinks a day. Heavy drinking is associated with a double risk of death from cardiovascular disease and hypertensive disease regardless the age, hypertension status, smoking, body mass index, and total alcohol consumption, along with other factors. Dr. Brian Silver says that this is not only the case of Korea and it is a normal biological effect that can be observed no matter the region that is studied. Ohrr’s believes that the link between heavy drinking and hypertension may be that, as seen drinking increases blood pressure, causes arterial stiffness and endothelial dysfunction, and precipitates cardiac arrhythmia. They observed that wine or beer are very rarely drank in Korea, and that people prefer instead local alcohol drinks known as soju and makkoli.
