Moderate drinking of beer, wine and spirits cuts the risk of heart failure in the elderly according to a report published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Jerome Abramson of the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, led a study on 2,235 people with an average age of 74, all free of heart failure when the research began in 1982. By 1996, 281 of the group had developed heart disease and 28 people had died from it. Those who had drunk the most alcohol (two to six glasses of wine or equivalent a day) had the lowest rate of heart failure, 47 per cent below tee-totallers.