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Wine and Mortality
- Morten Grønbaek, MD, DrMedSci, PhD
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IN RESPONSE:
Dr. Kahn adds to the long list of possible explanations for the apparent beneficial effect of wine compared with beer and spirits on morbidity and mortality. His opinions are of great interest. However, I doubt that the beverage-specific differences in waist-to-hip ratio can explain some, if any, of this effect. First, although there truly do seem to be differences, as found in the two studies mentioned by Dr. Kahn, they would need to be quite large (larger than those reported) to be able to explain our findings. Second, we did consider body weight in the analyses, but since participants who did not drink wine had a mean body mass index of 26 kg/m2 and those who did had a body mass index of 25 kg/m2, it had no effect on mortality, as can be seen in our Table 1. Third, the apparent added beneficial effect of wine in our study seemed to apply mainly to death from cancer and not to death from coronary heart disease, which is much more strongly associated with increases in waist-to-hip ratio.
Morten Grønbaek, MD, DrMedSci, PhD
Copenhagen University Hospital; DK-1399 Copenhagen K, Denmark
- Copyright ©2004 by the American College of Physicians
