Mixing Alcohol With High Blood Pressure Is Not A Drink Of Choice

Prevention is always an important part of managing your health. Ideally, you want to do everything you can so as not to develop health-related conditions in the first place. But if they do develop, the goal should be to do as much as possible to try and reverse the condition, while also doing as little as possible to make the condition worse. One-third of U.S. adults have high blood pressure (hypertension) and it can have multiple causes ranging from poor dietary habits to inadequate amounts of sleep to being overloaded with high levels of stress. In order to help relax and reduce stress, many people may “unwind” at the end of the day with a cocktail or glass of wine. But that may actually be doing more harm than good. Even an ounce of alcohol a day might alter heart function if you have high blood pressure, researchers report.

In a recent study at the University of Udine School of Medicine in Italy, researchers examined the effect of alcohol on 335 patients with high blood pressure who had no other heart problems. Their heart function was measured with an electrocardiogram and heart scans and they were asked about their drinking patterns. For someone with high blood pressure, even small amounts of drinking can impair functioning of the lower left chamber of the heart, which pumps blood to the rest of the body. Those who drank the most had thicker left ventricular walls, stiffening the chamber and making it function less efficiently, the researchers said. They also found signs of heart damage in nearly half the participants, which was associated with how much they drank. The more they drank, the more trouble the heart had properly filling with blood between each heartbeat, which could lead to more serious conditions such as a heart attack.

Patients with more damage tended to be older, heavier, have diabetes and higher blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol, the study authors noted. But after taking these factors into account, the researchers found that alcohol consumption still seemed to be a factor in damaging heart function. This should be concerning because hypertension contributes to more than 350,000 deaths each year in the United States, which equates to about 1,000 per day! If high blood pressure is a major risk factor for developing heart failure, and alcohol is showing that it can contribute to the progression of it, then eliminating or limiting alcohol consumption seems to be an easy preventative measure.

From a health perspective, alcohol offers no benefit to the body. It provides no real nutritional value and can also add stress to the body by promoting dehydration and fat deposition and inflammation in the liver. And then there is the effect on weight! So while it is enjoyable to many to partake in alcohol consumption occasionally, those at risk for serious heart conditions may want to take a pass and choose another drink of choice to maximize their longevity and quality of life.