Study Links Drinking, Early Death

Women who took at least two alcoholic drinks a day were three times more likely than abstainers to die before age 65, a study found.

The difference was nearly twofold for men in the study, which was based on a national sample of people who died in 1986.

For women, 40.7% of so-called heavier drinkers died before age 65 versus 13.2% of abstainers. For men, the figures were 42.3% versus 22.4%.

Even people classified as moderate or light drinkers showed higher death rates than the abstainers.

The numbers cannot be interpreted as indicating risks of early death because of the way the study was done, cautioned co-author Darryl Bertolucci.

The study began with people who were already dead, and it worked backward to classify them according to their drinking habits, rather than starting with people of known habits and following them to find their risk of early death.