Alcohol intake, wine consumption and the development of depression: the PREDIMED study

Since your doctor never follows research at all and brings ideas into the stroke department you will never have to worry about getting served alcohol to prevent your very likely chance of getting depressed post-stroke. But you could wave this in their faces. My next stroke will be a hoot, I'll be pointing constantly to research and asking how many decades does it take to bring it in house. It is only 2.5 years old so that already tells you your doctor is not a leader or innovator. It is dual purpose, all that drinking will do wonders to challenge your balance making you recover that much faster.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/192

Alfredo Gea¹, Juan J Beunza², Ramón Estruch³⁴, Almudena Sánchez-Villegas³⁵, Jordi Salas-Salvadó³⁶, Pilar Buil-Cosiales⁷, Enrique Gómez-Gracia³⁸, María-Isabel Covas³⁹, Dolores Corella¹⁰³, Miquel Fiol¹¹³, Fernando Arós¹²³, José Lapetra¹³³, Rosa-María Lamuela-Raventós¹⁴³, Julia Wärnberg³⁸, Xavier Pintó¹⁵³, Lluis Serra-Majem³⁵, Miguel A Martínez-González^13* and for the PREDIMED GROUP

• * Corresponding author: Miguel A Martínez-González mamartinez@unav.es

Author Affiliations

¹ Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Medical School-Clinica Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
² School of Medicine, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
³ CIBER Fisiopatología de la Obesidad y Nutrición (CIBERObn), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
⁴ Department of Internal Medicine, Hospital Clinic, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
⁵ Department of Clinical Sciences, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
⁶ Human Nutrition Unit, IISPV, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Reus, Spain
⁷ Spain Primary Care, Servicio Navarro de Salud, Osasunbidea, Pamplona, Spain
⁸ Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain
⁹ Lipids and Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit, Institut Municipal d’Investigació Mèdica (IMIM), Barcelona, Spain
¹⁰ Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
¹¹ Institute of Health Sciences (IUNICS), University of Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
¹² Department of Cardiology, Araba University Hospital, Vitoria, Spain
¹³ Department of Family Medicine, Primary Care Division of Sevilla, Centro de Salud San Pablo, Sevilla, Spain
¹⁴ Nutrition and Food Science Department– XaRTA, INSA, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
¹⁵ Internal Medicine Service, Hospital of Bellvitge, Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain

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BMC Medicine 2013, 11:192  doi:10.1186/1741-7015-11-192
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/192

Received:	10 April 2013
Accepted:	26 July 2013
Published:	30 August 2013

© 2013 Gea et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Background

Alcoholic beverages are widely consumed. Depression, the most prevalent mental disorder worldwide, has been related to alcohol intake. We aimed to prospectively assess the association between alcohol intake and incident depression using repeated measurements of alcohol intake.

Methods

We followed-up 5,505 high-risk men and women (55 to 80 y) of the PREDIMED Trial for up to seven years. Participants were initially free of depression or a history of depression, and did not have any history of alcohol-related problems. A 137-item validated food frequency questionnaire administered by a dietician was repeated annually to assess alcohol intake. Participants were classified as incident cases of depression when they reported a new clinical diagnosis of depression, and/or initiated the use of antidepressant drugs. Cox regression analyses were fitted over 23,655 person-years.

Results

Moderate alcohol intake within the range of 5 to 15 g/day was significantly associated with lower risk of incident depression (hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 0.72 (0.53 to 0.98) versus abstainers). Specifically, wine consumption in the range of two to seven drinks/week was significantly associated with lower rates of depression (HR (95% CI) = 0.68 (0.47 to 0.98)).

Conclusions

Moderate consumption of wine may reduce the incidence of depression, while heavy drinkers seem to be at higher risk.