Drinking alcohol seems to have a dose-dependent inverse association with the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study has suggested.
Researchers investigated the association using two population studies in Sweden with participants between the ages of 16 and 70 years: 745 cases of MS plus 1,761 controls in the Epidemiological Investigation of Multiple Sclerosis (EIMS) study and 5,874 cases of MS with 5,246 controls in the Genes and Environment in Multiple Sclerosis (GEMS) study.
In EIMS, women who reported high alcohol consumption had an odds ratio (OR) of 0.6 of developing MS compared with nondrinking women, and men with high alcohol consumption had an OR of 0.5 compared with nondrinking men, according to the results.
The corresponding OR comparison in GEMS was 0.7 for both women and men.
