Cardiovascular risk factors and confounders among nondrinking and moderate-drinking U.S. adults.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Cross-sectional survey data analysis
PubMed 15831343 · doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2005.01.011
What was done
Authors analyzed cross-sectional data from the 2003 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a population-based telephone survey of U.S. adults, to compare the prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and potential confounders between moderate drinkers (average of ≤2 drinks/day for men, ≤1 drink/day for women) and nondrinkers after adjusting for age and gender across 30 CVD-associated factors.
What was found
After adjusting for age and gender, 27 of 30 assessed CVD-associated factors (90%) were significantly more prevalent among nondrinkers than moderate drinkers. For multi-category factors like body weight, individuals in higher-risk categories were progressively more likely to be nondrinkers. Excluding participants with poor health status or prior CVD did not alter the results.
Why it matters
This study demonstrates that nondrinkers possess systematically higher baseline CVD risk profiles, suggesting that reported cardiovascular benefits of moderate drinking in observational cohorts may be driven by residual confounding.
Limits
The study is an observational, cross-sectional telephone survey reliant on self-reported data, which introduces recall and misclassification biases. The specific sample size (n) is not reported in the abstract, and hard cardiovascular endpoints were not tracked over time.
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