Alcohol intake and mortality: Findings from the National Health Interview Surveys (1988 and 1990)

The authors used prospective data from two supplemental studies of the Nati onal Health Interview Survey, the 1988 Alcohol Supplement and the 1990 Heal th Promotion and Disease Prevention Supplement, to examine the relation bet ween alcohol intake and mortality. Their study included 17,821 men and 25,8 74 women aged 40 years or older at baseline; during an average of 6 years o f follow-up, 5,540 deaths occurred. The alcohol-mortality relation was U-sh aped for men and J-shaped for women. On the basis of categorical analyses a djusted for age, race, smoking, and baseline diseases, men who drank 2 drin ks per day had a significantly lower risk of death compared with abstainers (relative risk = 0.60, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.45, 0.82). The rela tive risk was 0.75 (95% CI: 0.55, 1.03) after further adjustment for marita l status, education, and self-perceived health status. For women, the corre sponding relative risks were 0.69 (95% CI: 0.61, 0.78) and 0.79 (95% CI: 0. 70, 0.90) for those who drank less than 1 drink per day. When drinking cate gory was considered as an ordinal variable and fitted with a quadratic func tion in the Cox model, the estimated optimal alcohol intake was approximate ly less than 1 to 1 drink per day for men and lifetime infrequent to less t han 1 drink per day for women. Data from these representative US cohorts de monstrated that less than 2 drinks per day for men and less than 1 drink pe r day for women are associated with the lowest all-cause mortality.