Association of Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes

To determine whether alcohol consumption can be associated with a decreased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 38 multi-language cohort, case-cohort, case-control, or nested case-control studies on alcohol and diabetes involving nearly 2 million participants (84% of men and 58% of women reported as Asian).

• Non-Asian populations show primarily an inverse relation of alcohol (an “L-shaped” curve) with the risk of diabetes, but Asian populations show an opposite increase in risk.
• In overall analyses, only females showed a significant inverse association between alcohol consumption and the risk of diabetes.
• Peak risk reduction (18%) was observed among people with average consumption of 10–14 g alcohol in a day, compared with abstainers.

Comments:

In general, many of the factors that relate to diabetes (diet, body size and adiposity, type of beverage consumed, etc.) are quite different between Asian and non-Asian populations; combining such groups when their analyses show opposite effects of alcohol on diabetes risk may not be a reasonable way of trying to develop results that apply globally. The authors could not take the pattern of drinking or the type of beverage into consideration; both factors have been shown to affect the risk of developing diabetes.

R. Curtis Ellison, MD

Reference:

Knott C, Bell S, Britton A. Alcohol consumption and the risk of type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of more than 1.9 million individuals from 38 observational studies. Diabetes Care. 2015;38:1804–1812.