Aim: To determine risk of various vascular diseases and all-cause mortality with alcohol consumption
There is debate about whether moderate alcohol consumption reduces or increases risk of cardiovascular disease. To improve the validity of comparisons, we will assess the shape, specificity, magnitude and independence of associations between alcohol consumption and risk of various vascular outcomes and all cause mortality.
This proposed research will yield reliable findings with potentially important implications for public health with regards to recommended drinking levels for the prevention of vascular disease.
Data from UK Biobank will be combined with individual-participant data on 300,238 current drinkers from 91 prospective studies (18,326 cardiovascular events) from the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration and with 24,000 current drinkers from EPIC-CVD.
We will perform a meta-analysis of individual-participant data from multiple studies to calculate hazard ratios across pre-defined categories of long-term average alcohol consumption for different fatal cardiovascular diseases and for non-fatal myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular disease. The analyses will be restricted to those without a history of cardiovascular disease and current drinkers. We estimate this to be approximately 261,000 participants.