Good news for your patients who enjoy their sips of wine in the evening. According to researchers at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland Calif, People who reported consuming one or two alcoholic drinks a day, particularly wine, were about one-quarter less likely to be hospitalized for COPD.
Stanton T. Siu, MD, who presented a poster at the International [removed]Scientific Assembly of the American College of Chest Physicians [/removed]meeting in Philadelphia, found that compared with lifelong abstainers, individuals who drank one or two daily drinks had an adjusted relative risk of 0.76(95% C0.61 to 0.94) of a subsequent hospitalization for.
The study of 126,000 people, found that this benefit was especially true for those who drank red wine. The risks of COPD hospitalizations among beer and liquor drinkers across all level of drinking relative to abstainers, was close to 1.0, but wine drinkers were significantly less likely to have a COPD hospitalization (RR 0.92, 95% CI 0.87 to 0.95).
Siu cautioned, however, that the data do not demonstrate a clear protective effect from moderate drinking. It may be that other factors such as diet, exercise, and other lifestyle factors associated with certain drinking habits, may account for the findings, although, he added, certain effects of alcohol—antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immunostimulant, and bronchodilatory activities—might be beneficial to COPD patients.
