The researchers reported that women who had five or more full-calorie beers a week (but not those who drank light beer or other liquor) were at almost twice the risk for psoriasis.
Beer is usually made from barley, and the starch used to ferment it contains gluten, which have been linked to psoriasis, said the study’s lead author, Dr Abrar A Qureshi, an assistant professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The scientists tracked 82,869 psoriasis-free participants in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1991 until 2005. The women, who were 27 to 44 years old at the beginning of the study, provided information about their alcohol consumption every few years. By the end of the study, 1,150 of the nurses had developed psoriasis. The regular beer drinkers were 1.76 times as likely to have it as the others, independent of other risk factors like smoking, physical activity and weight, according to the study, published in Archives of Dermatology.
Though the study does not definitively prove that beer drinking leads to psoriasis, Dr Qureshi said, the researchers did set it up to look for possible causes. “In terms of temporal sequence,” he continued, “ beer intake preceded the onset of psoriasis.”