Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Demography. 2011 Aug;48(3):1105-25. doi: 10.1007/s13524-011-0035-2.
There has been a growing consensus that moderate consumption of alcohol is associated with a lower risk of mortality and that this association is probably causal. However, a recent review article has raised a serious challenge to this consensus. In short, it determined that most prior research in this area committed serious misclassification errors; furthermore, among those studies that were free of these misclassification errors, no support for a protective role of alcohol consumption was found. This article reexamines the issue using prospective data for more than 124,000 persons interviewed in the U.S. National Health Interview Surveys of 1997 through 2000 with mortality follow-up through 2002 using the Linked Mortality File. The study involves about 488,000 person-years. Controlling for a variety of covariates, this study finds that compared with nondrinkers, those who consume a moderate amount of alcohol have lower all-cause and CHD mortality. The fact that the current study has taken care to avoid the pitfalls of some earlier studies and still finds that those who consume a moderate amount of alcohol have lower all-cause mortality and CHD mortality lends credence to the argument that the relationship is causal.
越来越多的人认为，适量饮酒与较低的死亡率相关，这种关联可能是因果关系。然而，最近的一篇评论文章对这一共识提出了严峻挑战。简而言之，它确定了该领域的大多数先前研究都存在严重的分类错误；此外，在那些没有这些分类错误的研究中，没有发现饮酒对健康有保护作用。本文使用美国国家健康访谈调查（1997 年至 2000 年）中超过 124000 名受访者的前瞻性数据，并通过链接死亡率文件对 2002 年之前的死亡率进行随访，重新审视了这个问题。该研究涉及约 488000 人年。通过控制各种协变量，本研究发现，与不饮酒者相比，适量饮酒者的全因死亡率和冠心病死亡率较低。本研究已注意避免一些早期研究的缺陷，并且仍然发现适量饮酒者的全因死亡率和冠心病死亡率较低，这为饮酒与健康之间的因果关系提供了依据。
