. It’s an impressive size, with more than 19,500 participants recording their alcohol consumption and being followed up for an average of more than five years to check how their blood pressure changed.
The average person’s blood pressure increases with age. But the study found that those who drank more alcohol – any amount above fullThat overall result does obscure something interesting: when the authors split the results by sex, they found that the result was mainly in men, where there’s a clear, linear relation between more alcohol and faster increases in blood pressure.
But if you’d only looked at women, you probably wouldn’t have concluded there was much going on at all. This might have been because far fewer women than men drank high amounts of alcohol, so the relation between blood pressure and alcohol consumption becomes much fuzzier as you get to the higher end of the scale.
Looking in subgroups, though, is often misleading. The authors write that future studies should look in more detail at the effect specifically in women, to try and work out what’s happening.. It had an even bigger sample – more than 142,000 people – but found something rather different. They didn’t look at blood pressure specifically, but at death. And here, they found that moderate drinkers of either sex were healthier than teetotallers.