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We also provide state-of-the-art rehab services to help you maintain the sobriety you achieve during detox. Contact us today to learn more about how we can how does alcohol affect blood pressure help you begin a healthier, alcohol-free life in recovery. Nearly half of adults in the United States struggle with some degree of high blood pressure.
However, researchers are still seeking to understand the full impact of certain risk factors. If you have high blood pressure, avoid alcohol or drink alcohol only in moderation. For healthy adults, that means up to one drink a day for women and up to two drinks a day for men.
Does Alcohol Raise Blood Pressure the Next Day?
Many of the effects of drinking every day can be reversed through early intervention but become harder to treat with time. It’s critical to recognize alcohol abuse and treat alcoholism as early as possible to avoid irreversible damage to the brain and body. Once the effects of alcohol wear off, so does the feeling of happiness, pleasure and satisfaction caused by the neurotransmitters. A person can experience these feelings again if they drink alcohol again.
A Dutch study showed that heart-healthy nutrients called polyphenols in red wine help prevent heart disease, but not because of a drop in blood pressure. Research shows that the polyphenols improve the cells lining the blood vessels, and do improve blood flow and heart health. The jury is still out, though, on whether this could potentially improve high blood pressure in severe cases. Methodological differences between studies might have affected measurement of the reported outcomes.
Giovannelli 2011 published data only
The hypertensive effect of alcohol after 13 hours of consumption could be the result of the rise in vasoconstrictors and the homeostatic response to restore blood pressure. Plasma renin activity was reported to be increased in Kawano 2000 as a late effect of alcohol consumption. High‐dose alcohol consumption increased HR by approximately 6 bpm in participants, and the effect lasted up to 12 hours. After that, HR was still raised in participants, but it averaged 2.7 bpm. Chen 1986 reported that two participants in the alcohol group dropped out of the study for unknown reasons, so data analyses were based on eight participants in the alcohol group and on 10 participants in the control group.
Most studies gave participants 15 to 30 minutes to finish their drinks, started measuring outcomes sometime after that, and continued taking measurements for a certain period, but there were some exceptions. Chen 1986 did not report consumption duration nor timing of measurement of BP and HR. Dai 2002 gave participants five minutes to consume high doses of alcohol and measured outcomes immediately. On the other hand, Fantin 2016 allowed participants to continue drinking during the period of outcome measurement. These differences in alcohol consumption duration and in outcome measurement times probably contributed to the wide variation in blood pressure in these studies and affected overall results of the meta‐analysis.
What does the study show?
Most importantly, masked hypertension, where patients are hypertensive at home but not in the doctor’s office, is as serious a health risk as sustained hypertension. For example, some people who are on cholesterol-lowering medicines may experience muscle aches when they drink alcohol. Because alcohol and cholesterol medicine both are processed through your liver, they are, in a sense, competing for clearance.
