Alcohol drinking habits, alcohol dehydrogenase genotypes and risk of acute coronary syndrome

Aims: The risk of myocardial infarction is lower among light-to-moderate drinkers compared with abstainers. Results from some previous studies, but not all, suggest that this association is modified by variations in genes coding for alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). We aimed to test this hypothesis, including alcohol as both the amount of alcohol and the frequency of drinking.

Methods: we conducted a nested case-cohort study within the Danish Diet, Cancer and Health study, including 1,645 men (770 incident cases of acute coronary syndrome from 1993-1997 through 2004 and 875 randomly selected controls). Results: Higher alcohol intake (measured as amount or drinking frequency) was associated with lower risk of acute coronary syndrome; however, there was no evidence that these finding were modified by ADH1B or ADH1C genotypes.

Conclusions: The importance of functional variation in alcohol dehydrogenase for the association between alcohol drinking habits and the risk of developing acute coronary syndrome, if any, is very limited.