Moderate alcohol consumption inversely correlated with all-cause mortality

My roommate recently sent me a review article that LW might find interesting:

Conclusions: Low levels of alcohol intake (1-2 drinks per day for women and 2-4 drinks per day for men) are inversely associated with total mortality in both men and women. Our findings, while confirming the hazards of excess drinking, indicate potential windows of alcohol intake that may confer a net beneficial effect of moderate drinking, at least in terms of survival.

Personal observation says that LWers tend not to drink very much or often. Perhaps that should change, to the degree suggested by the article?

Full article here.

My roommate recently sent me a review article that LW might find interesting:

Conclusions: Low levels of alcohol intake (1-2 drinks per day for women and 2-4 drinks per day for men) are inversely associated with total mortality in both men and women. Our findings, while confirming the hazards of excess drinking, indicate potential windows of alcohol intake that may confer a net beneficial effect of moderate drinking, at least in terms of survival.

Personal observation says that LWers tend not to drink very much or often. Perhaps that should change, to the degree suggested by the article?

Full article here.

Unadjusted associations in observational studies should not guide decisions ("hospitals have a lot of sick people, therefore I should stay away from hospitals because they will make me sick!"). Either use a randomized trial, which is the gold standard for establishing causal association, or use an observational study and adjust for confounding and other biases appropriately.

I do avoid hospitals (except in emergencies) and precisely because they are dangerous.

7OrphanWilde14y

"hospitals have a lot of sick people, therefore I should stay away from hospitals because they will make me sick!" * That's not necessarily as silly as your offhand treatment seems to suggest; it's precisely one of the explanations proposed for some of the RAND health insurance experiment's results. (One of the conclusions the RAND study suggested was that, for people who aren't both poor and chronically ill, reduction in healthcare services (resulting from increased use fees) might not have a significant impact on health. It wasn't designed to test this relationship, however, and I'm unaware of any subsequent studies which were.)

0James_Miller14y

even then you have placebo and file drawer effects. [...] from the article: "Whenever possible, adjusted relative risks were extracted; otherwise, crude relative risks and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated from the number of events."