Abstract P245: Amount and Frequency of Alcohol Consumption and the Risk of Incident Pulmonary Embolism in the Nurses’ Health Study

Abstract

Introduction: Moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with differences in hemostatic factor levels that may lead to a lower thrombotic risk, but the association between alcohol consumption and the risk of incident pulmonary embolism (PE) has been inconsistent. Hypotheses: Moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower PE risk than lower or higher quantities, and more frequent alcohol consumption is associated with a lower PE risk than less frequent alcohol consumption. Methods: Nurses’ Health Study participants free of venous thromboembolism in 1984 (n=79,914) reported alcohol consumption every two-four years between 1984 and 2012 and number of drinking days per week on five questionnaires between 1986 and 2004. PE were initially identified by self-report and were confirmed for the subset of patients without a previous cancer using a combination of medical record review and participant reconfirmation. Cox Proportional Hazards models estimated multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios for PE associated with average amount of alcohol consumed and, separately, drinking days per week. Secondary analyses estimated the risk of medical-record confirmed idiopathic PE, events which were not associated with surgery, trauma, or cancer. Results: We identified 1,112 total incident PE events, including 360 idiopathic PE events, during 28 years of follow-up. In multivariable-adjusted analyses, we found no strong evidence of an association between the amount of alcohol consumed per day and the risk of any PE (quadratic p-trend=0.3) or idiopathic PE (quadratic p-trend=0.4) or between the frequency of alcohol consumption and the risk of any PE (linear p-trend=0.5) or idiopathic PE (linear p-trend=0.8) (Table). Conclusions: Among this population of women with relatively low average amounts of alcohol consumption, we found no substantial evidence of an association between the amount or frequency of alcohol consumption and the risk of PE.