Women who drink wine achieve planned pregnancies faster than other women, new research has shown.
A study of almost 30 000 women shows that women who drink wine get pregnant more quickly than those who drink beer or spirits.
"Wine drinkers experienced significantly shorter waiting times [to pregnancy] compared with those who reported no wine intake," says a report of the study in Human Reproduction (2003;18:1967-71), which was based on the Danish national birth cohort.
The aim of the study was to examine the relation between specific types of alcohol consumption and waiting time to pregnancy. Although several studies have looked at alcohol consumption and women's fecundity—the time it takes for a sexually active couple not using contraception to achieve pregnancy—the authors say that to their knowledge no study has had the power or data to examine the effect of specific types of alcohol.
All of the participants were asked how much they drank and whether it was beer, wine, or spirits, and how long they had tried to become pregnant before succeeding.
Half of the women became pregnant within the first two months of trying, and 15% waited long than 12 months. In general, while they were trying to get pregnant, women consumed more wine than beer and a very small amount of spirits. Almost 80% had a moderate intake of wine—between 0.5 and 7 glasses a week—but only half of the women consumed the same amount of alcohol by drinking beer.
"When we divided the participants into exclusive preference groups—beer, wine, spirits, mixed and abstainers—wine preferrers experienced the shortest waiting times," wrote the researchers, who were led by Mette Juhl from the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre at the Statens Serum Institute, Copenhagen. "When we grouped the women according to their drinking patterns, we found that women who drank only beer or only spirits waited longer to become pregnant than all other combinations."
They added that, in general, the women who reported drinking no wine, beer, or spirits waited longer to get pregnant than the women who reported some intake. Women who drank all three types of alcohol waited the shortest time to get pregnant. The authors said: "Our findings suggest that drinking wine may be associated with a modestly decreased risk of sub-fecundity. Sub-fecundity did not appear to be related to beer or spirits consumption."
Just how wine might have such an effect is not clear. The findings of other studies have suggested that moderate wine drinkers are at lower risk of lung cancer, cancer of the digestive tract, stroke, and overall mortality than non-drinkers and moderate drinkers of beer and spirits. In addition, antioxidants have been identified as a potentially beneficial compound in wine.
The authors of the study caution that the wine drinking effect they observed could be explained by confounders: "If wine drinkers differ from others—if they, for example, have fewer infections that cause sterility, have more sexual contacts, have more appropriate timing of intercourse, or have partners with better sperm quality—they would have shorter waiting times."