Alcohol study drinks to your health

So it may come as a bit of a surprise that a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is undertaking the most rigorous study yet to answer an age-old, high-octane question: Can a daily dose of alcohol help prevent heart disease?

Previous research has suggested that it does, but these studies had shortcomings. Now Dr. Kenneth Mukamal has embarked on a study of alcohol's health consequences modeled on the gold-standard trials used to evaluate new drugs.

Half of the study participants, who are 55 and older, will be randomly chosen to drink a concoction of grain alcohol mixed in Crystal Light - lemonade or raspberry-lemonade, their choice - while the others receive an unadulterated version. None of the participants will know who's getting a jug filled with the spiked drink, because grain alcohol is virtually tasteless. Their blood will be measured, a key artery will be evaluated, and the results may yield telling clues about a long-lingering medical - and social - question.

There's no shortage of people interested in participating.

"It's a unique opportunity," said Mukamal, a Beth Israel Deaconess internist, "to put some of these questions to rest about what alcohol does to us."

Most of what we know about the health effects of alcohol - does it prevent heart disease? does it cause cancer? - is mined from studies asking people to recall their drinking patterns, which isn't always reliable. Despite that, it's been the best that scientists have had when developing recommendations about safe drinking habits.

As a result, the public often feels whipsawed. One week, alcohol's good for you. The next, it's bad for you.

"Large numbers of the public are getting recommendations or are making their decisions about drinking based on imperfect information," said Dr. Tim Naimi, a researcher in the alcohol program at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's almost unethical to continue to allow people to make decisions that could have important life consequences in the absence of the best kind of scientific evidence."

In Mukamal's study, underwritten by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, he will track 40 patients for six months each, providing them with their monthly supply of libation - premixed - in one-gallon jugs, taken 5 ounces at a time. Participants drinking the brew that contains alcohol down the equivalent of a medium glass of wine.

Blood tests will be used to monitor alcohol's effect on cholesterol levels, and scans will be used to examine fat deposits in arteries.

The research also aims to determine whether participants can resist a glass of wine over dinner during the study.

"We're asking you to drink what we give you every night, but no other alcohol for six months," Mukamal said. "Compare the challenge we face to conducting a trial of any drug, when all one needs to do is pop a pill every day."

If that works, he plans to undertake a longer study of alcohol's health effects.

Nearly 100 intrigued potential participants have expressed interest, responding to ads on Craigslist, posters, and giveaway newspapers. "Once they saw the word 'alcohol,' " the doctor said, "we tended to get people who drank too much even though we were looking for the opposite."

In fact, they were looking for the Goldilocks of drinkers: those who do consume alcohol, but not too much, not too little. The researchers did not want to contribute to a problem drinker's habit, nor did they think it ethical to begin serving alcohol to teetotalers.

But one researcher who studies the health effects of alcohol nonetheless questioned the appropriateness of the study. Naomi Allen, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, presided over a study of women that indicated that a daily serving of alcohol potentially raised the overall risk of cancer by 6 percent, with breast tumors accounting for much of that increase.

"Six months? Every day? Blimey," Allen said in a telephone interview. "I'm not sure of the ethics of it."

Mukamal said he did not believe that worries about cancer risk during a short-term trial, which was approved by a hospital ethics panel, were sufficiently large to threaten the viability of his study.

When participants such as Dan Ruderman enter the study, they sign a consent form that delineates the potential link between alcohol and cancer. Like anyone participating in the study, Ruderman had to have underlying conditions or family history putting him at risk for heart disease. In his case, it's diabetes and high blood pressure.

"I thought," said Ruderman, a retired lawyer from Newton, "it was an opportunity to be a little bit of a participant to help get an answer to whether alcohol is harmful or helpful to people."

Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.