It has already been disclosed that moderate intake of alcohol everyday keeps heart diseases at bay.

This time, the researchers at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) revealed some more advantages of alcohol intake.

The new research suggested that consumption of alcohol at light to moderate levels can also help older people to avoid the chances of developing physical disabilities that would prevent them from performing common tasks such as walking, dressing and grooming.

Study’s lead author, Dr. Arun S. Karlamangla, M.D., an associate professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said, “If you start out in good health, alcohol consumption at light to moderate levels can be beneficial.”

Dr. Karlamangla and his fellow-workers based their study on the facts available from three sets of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey’s Epidemiologic Follow-up Study (1982, 1987 and 1992).

They included 4,276 people (92% of them were white) with a mean age of 60.4 years.

People were classified as light to moderate if they had less than 15 drinks each week and less than 5 drinks daily (less than 4 drinks daily for females), whereas people who drank 15 or more drinks in a week or five or more in a day (four or more for women) were classified as heavy drinkers. The last group consisted of abstainers who drank fewer than 12 alcoholic beverages the previous year.

Researchers asked the study participants whether they face no difficulty, some difficulty or much difficulty performing simple daily tasks such as walking, eating, grooming, dressing etc.

At the beginning of the study, no one had reported such problems. But 7% of participants died and 15% became disabled over a period of five years.

The researchers discovered that healthy elderly people who consumed light to moderate alcohol were found to have a lower risk for developing new disabilities than both abstainers and heavy drinkers.

According to the authors, “Light to moderate alcohol consumption appears to have disability prevention benefits only in men and women in relatively good health. The reasons seem to be related to starting to drink alcohol in a current state of disability.”

“It is possible that those who report poor health have progressed too far on the pathway to disability to accrue benefits from alcohol consumption and that alcohol consumption may even be deleterious for them,” authors added.

The study findings appear online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.