Patients with chronic diseases must have listened to this advice no less than a hundred times: smoke less, drink less, drink alcohol and hurt your body... Wait a minute.
Smoke is an undoubted carcinogen that greatly endangers the health of the body. But the question of whether high blood pressure can drink alcohol has always been controversial.
Some people say that drinking alcohol will increase blood pressure; but some people find that after drinking alcohol, their blood pressure drops?
In fact, both statements are correct, listen to "ask the doctor" to give you specific analysis.
The relationship between drinking alcohol and rising blood pressure
(1) After drinking wine, blood pressure decreases
When the amount of alcohol consumed does not exceed 25 grams, the whole alcohol is broken down in the liver into acetaldehyde, which can relax blood vessels, resulting in a slight drop in blood pressure.
Over the next few hours, as acetaldehyde is metabolized into carbon dioxide and water, blood pressure gradually returns to normal. Simply put: drink a little less, and your blood pressure will drop.
(2) After drinking wine, blood pressure rises
When the amount of alcohol consumed exceeds 25 grams, in addition to the alcohol that the liver is metabolizing, there is a large amount of alcohol stored in the blood, which stimulates the central nervous system and excites the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in an increase in heart rate.
The heart rate is faster, the speed and force at which the heart pumps out blood pressure increases, and the pressure of blood on the walls of blood vessels increases, resulting in an increase in blood pressure.
Therefore, whether it is to raise blood pressure or lower blood pressure after drinking wine mainly depends on how much you drink.
Is there a benefit to lowering a little blood pressure by drinking a small amount of alcohol?
Some friends will ask, since drinking no more than 25 grams of alcohol can reduce blood pressure, does it mean that drinking a small amount of alcohol is still beneficial?
Not really.
Because although alcohol is broken down into ethanol, ethanol can relax blood vessels, thereby reducing blood pressure, but after a period of time ethanol will be decomposed, no longer has the effect of vasodilation, blood pressure will return to the original level.
Therefore, the blood pressure lowering effect brought by drinking a little wine is only temporary, and it does not help the condition of high blood pressure.
On the contrary, the latest research in the international authoritative medical journal "The Lancet" shows that no matter how much alcohol is drunk, it is not good for cardiovascular disease, breaking the myth that "a small amount of alcohol is good for cardiovascular health".
On March 25, 2022, researchers at MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute published an article sampling 371463 adults (average age 57 years with an average weekly drinking of 9.2 standard cups), which showed that those who drank small to moderate alcohol had the lowest risk of heart disease, followed by those who quit alcohol, and those who drank heavily had the highest risk of heart disease.
Hey, is drinking less alcohol less risky than quitting alcohol? Doesn't that say there are benefits to drinking a small amount of alcohol?
Non also! Because the research team further found that people who drank small amounts tended to have healthier lifestyles than those who quit drinking, they exercised more, ate more vegetables, and didn't smoke yet.
Therefore, this benefit is not due to small amounts of alcohol consumption, but due to lifestyle differences, and after excluding this factor, drinking alcohol no longer has health benefits.
Overall, the study shows that even small amounts of alcohol increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, and as alcohol consumption increases, the risk of cardiovascular disease increases rapidly.
Drinking alcohol and cardiovascular disease risk
How dangerous is it to have your blood pressure spike when you drink heavily?
(1) Myocardial infarction
Hypertensive patients often have different degrees of atherosclerosis in their blood vessels, and hypertensive patients with atherosclerosis drink alcohol, and the high-pressure blood may break through the atherosclerosis, so that the sediment inside gushes out like a volcanic eruption, turning into a blood clot in the blood vessels, completely blocking the original narrow blood vessels.
If there is a blood clot in the coronary artery that supplies blood and oxygen to the heart, it will cause the heart to stop beating, that is, myocardial infarction.
(2) Stroke
Stroke is a general term used in Chinese medicine for a variety of acute cerebrovascular diseases, including cerebral hemorrhage and cerebral infarction. The disease not only has a high mortality and disability rate, but is also difficult to cure and easy to recur.
In life, because of drinking, examples of stroke and paralysis abound. Therefore, to avoid acute cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and myocardial infarction, patients with hypertension should be doubly careful when drinking, and once there is a tendency for blood pressure to rise and the heart rate to accelerate, they must immediately put down the wine glass!
Ask the doctor, let more people have health, make health simpler!
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