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Despite widespread medical opinion that alcoholic beverages may prevent heart disease, a leading medical expert is advising: don’t start drinking just yet.
    Anybody who’s ever worked in a hospital sees the hospital is full of patients that have alcohol related disease, but the hospital is not full of patients that have disease related to cholesterol and blood pressure-lowering medicines.
    In an editorial in the current New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Goldberg of Columbia University said it is time to see whether alcohol actually prevents heart disease. Such a study would give alcoholic beverages to one group of heart disease patients and not to another, and see which does better.
    In the latest study, which followed a group of men over a 12-year period, researchers found that those who drank three or more drinks per week reduced their risk of heart attack by 35 percent compared to abstainers.
    The lead author, physician Kenneth Mukamal of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, insists his study is different from the rest. For one thing, other studies have not looked at drinking patterns.
    Dr. Mukamal says his findings also appear to settle which alcoholic beverages are most heart healthy. "Beer and spirits, beer and liquor, were most strongly associated with reduced risk."