Abstract
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have demonstrated a J-shaped association of alcohol consumption with all-cause mortality and hypertension, but the majority of these studies focus on a single measurement of alcohol intake and were conducted in a Western population. Whether long-term trajectories of alcohol consumption are associated with all-cause mortality, hypertension, and a change in blood pressure remains to be elucidated. METHODS: In the large, population-based China Health and Nutrition Survey cohort from between 1993 and 2015, group-based trajectory modeling was conducted to identify distinct alcohol-consumption trajectory classes. We investigated their association with all-cause mortality and hypertension using Cox regression and binary logistics regression models. A restricted cubic spline was performed to determine the nonlinear relationships of mean alcohol intake with mortality and hypertension. Multivariate-adjusted generalized linear mixed-effects models were conducted to assess the change in blood pressure among alcohol-consumption trajectory classes. RESULTS: Among the 5298 participants, 48.4% were women and the mean age was 62.6 years. After 22 years of follow-up, 568 (10.7%) of the participants died and 1284 (24.2%) developed hypertension. Long-term light and moderate drinkers had a lower risk of death than the non-drinkers, and a restricted cubic spline showed a J-shaped relationship between mean alcohol intake and mortality. Although blood pressure increased slower in light and moderate drinkers, a reduced risk of hypertension was only observed in the former. The long-term heavy drinkers had the highest blood pressure and death rate. CONCLUSIONS: Light alcohol intake might be protective even in the long run, while heavy drinking reversed the beneficial effect. The causality of such a connection needs to be further investigated.