Alcohol as a Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes

By D. Baliunas, B. Taylor, H. Irving, M. Roerecke, Jayadeep Patra, Satyabrata Mohapatra, J. Rehm. Diabetes Care, 2009

717 citations recorded by the source corpus.

OBJECTIVE To clarify the dose-response relationship between alcohol consumption and type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A systematic computer-assisted and hand search was conducted to identify relevant articles with longitudinal design and quantitative measurement of alcohol consumption. Adjustment was made for the sick-quitter effect. We used fractional polynomials in a meta-regression to determine the dose-response relationships by sex and end point using lifetime abstainers as the reference group. RESULTS The search revealed 20 cohort studies that met our inclusion criteria. A U-shaped relationship was found for both sexes. Compared with lifetime abstainers, the relative risk (RR) for type 2 diabetes among men was most protective when consuming 22 g/day alcohol (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.76–1.00]) and became deleterious at just over 60 g/day alcohol (1.01 [0.71–1.44]). Among women, consumption of 24 g/day alcohol was most protective (0.60 [0.52–0.69]) and became deleterious at about 50 g/day alcohol (1.02 [0.83–1.26]). CONCLUSIONS Our analysis confirms previous research findings that moderate alcohol consumption is protective for type 2 diabetes in men and women.

Subfields: Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Epidemiology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/670f18520dd9c017493c9e93eef06a78b8eb788a

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J. Rehm
Gerhard E. Gmel
G. Gmel
O. Hasan
K. Shield
Sameer Imtiaz
A. Samokhvalov
S. Popova

Citations in the corpus

Dietary and Policy Priorities for Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, and Obesity – A Comprehensive Review (2016, neutral): “5 drink per day for women – is associated with lower incidence of CHD and diabetes mellitus, although not stroke.(288,289) Such observational analyses could partly overestimate benefits, because never drinkers could include those who have avoided alcohol because of unmeasured factors that relate to ”
The relationship between different dimensions of alcohol use and the burden of disease—an update (2017, background): “This decision has important public health relevance (see [198] for additional considerations), as the effect is fairly large, given the prevalence of diabetes mellitus world-wide [199,200] and the relatively high effect size found in epidemiological studies on alcohol use and the incidence of type 2”
Diabetes and Cancer (2010, neutral): “While excess alcohol consumption is also a risk factor for diabetes, moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with reduced diabetes incidence in both men and women (46,47).”