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Population study: followed a group

Study of 87,938 male US doctors: daily drinking linked to lower heart disease death

Ajani and colleagues · Circulation · 2000

Original title: Alcohol consumption and risk of coronary heart disease by diabetes status.

Under review. A person has not yet checked this summary against the paper. It is written from the PubMed abstract. Until a person checks it, search engines are asked not to list this page.

What the study found

Points to benefit

Death from heart disease: in men without diabetes, relative risk was 0.61 (95% CI 0.49 to 0.78) for daily drinkers. In men with diabetes it was 0.42 (95% CI 0.23 to 0.77).

The study at a glance

Type of study
Population study: followed a group
Who or what was studied
87,938 people · 87,938 male US doctors, 2790 of them with diabetes, followed 5.5 years
What was tested
Rare or no drinking vs monthly, weekly or daily drinking
What it measured
The question itself: heart disease and death
Who has a stake
No disclosure in PubMed
No COI statement in PubMed; government grants listed.
Journal
Circulation, 2000
Source
PubMed record 10920060. This page is based on the abstract only.

How much this study counts

  • –Shows a link, not a cause: people chose their own habits, and other differences between them may explain the result.
  • ✓Followed people over time, so habits were recorded before the outcome happened.
  • ✓Large: 87,938 people.
  • ✓Measured the question itself: heart disease and death.
  • •The PubMed record has no conflict-of-interest statement.
  • •Summarized from the PubMed abstract only. The full paper may hold details the abstract leaves out.

✓ Strength– Limit• Note

These points come from fixed rules about the type of study, its size and length, what it measured, and who has a stake. Every study on Digestery gets the same rules.

Where this study sits

Each dot is one on-topic paper on this question. Steps near the top answer the question more directly.

↑ Stronger evidence

  1. Trials in people: heart disease

    0

    Not done yet. This is the step that would answer the question.

  2. Trials in people: other measures

    0

    None among the papers we read.

  3. Trials in people: lab tests or safety

    0

    None among the papers we read.

  4. Population studies

    5

    3 benefit, 1 mixed, 1 harm

    ↑ This study is the ringed dot

  5. Blood levels and genes

    6

    1 mixed, 2 no difference, 3 harm

↓ Weaker evidence

  • Points to benefit
  • Mixed
  • No difference
  • No direction
  • Points to harm

How it fits with the other research

The short answer to “Is moderate drinking good or bad for your heart?”

Not shown to help; may harm.

Confidence: very low. Based on 21 on-topic papers.

Read the full answer

Of the other 4 papers on the same step: 2 benefit, 1 mixed, 1 harm. This one found benefit.

  • Quoted in “What we found”: Population studies often link light to moderate drinking with fewer heart attacks and heart deaths than not drinking. These studies show links, not causes.
  • Part of the finding “Population studies link light drinking to fewer heart deaths”.
  • Marked as a key paper in the research timeline: Daily drinking linked to fewer heart deaths in doctors.
  • Open item for a person: Ajani 2000 and Djoussé 2009 are tagged RCT in PubMed but are observational analyses inside trials.

Other papers on the same step

See all 21 studies on this question

How this page was made

Label

First read of the abstract
Claude Sonnet
Independent second read
Claude Haiku
Differences settled
The two reads agreed on every checked field. Claude Opus 5.5.
Headline
Claude Sonnet, from the checked study record. A script checked its numbers and wording.
Numbers
Checked against the abstract by a script
“How much this study counts”
Fixed rules, the same for every study
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