An Examination of the Association Between Alcohol Consumption and Type 2 Diabetes in the Framingham Heart Study

• Activity Number: 621 - Beyond Linear Regression: Nonlinear Association, Quantile Regression and Generalized Linear Models
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 1, 2019 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Saryet Kucukemiroglu* and Tingting Hu and Elizabeth Slate
• Companies: FDA and Florida State University and Florida State University
• Keywords: diabetes; alcohol; logistic regression

Abstract

The relation between alcohol intake and type 2 diabetes has been widely studied with conflicting conclusions. This association has been reported as protective, U-shaped, and inconsistent in different epidemiological studies. To our knowledge, most previous studies investigating this association only examined the effect for either men or women. In this study, we use the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) to analyze the association of alcohol consumption and type 2 diabetes in the American population for both men and women. Furthermore, we implemented a gender-specific categorization of alcohol intake. We examined two aspects of the association: (1) Early alcohol drinking level and diabetes in later life and (2) Early intake of each specific alcoholic subtype (beer, wine, and liquor) and diabetes in later life. The data consisted of 1,014 FHS participants who took Exams 16-23 during 1979-1996, which included diabetes assessment, and who had data on early-year alcohol use and key covariates. We investigated total alcohol consumption and consumption by alcoholic subtype. No significant association between early alcohol intake and type 2 diabetes in later life was found in this study.