New study reports that moderate drinking can help speed recovery for heart attack victims.

A glass of beer with dinner each night may improve the survival rate of heart attack victims and coronary disease patients, a study has found.

A University of California-San Francisco study of guinea pigs found that moderate alcohol consumption after a heart attack cut cell death in half and almost doubled the recovery of muscle function in the heart.

The same occurred in coronary disease patients who went on to have heart attacks, said Dr. Vincent Figueredo, a cardiologist at UCSF's San Francisco General Hospital and principal study author.

He emphasized that the benefit applies only to moderate alcohol usage, defined as one drink a day for a woman and two for a man. "If they've been consuming moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis, they certainly have a better chance of survival, of having less heart damage," Figueredo said Monday.

Despite the results, American Heart Association spokesman Phil Kibak cautioned against heart patients seizing on the study to begin drinking."We don't want to go out and tell people to start drinking alcohol if they don't drink already," he said. "But if you already drink, it probably means that drinking moderately after a heart attack may beneficial."

Previous studies have shown that alcohol can reduce the incidence of heart attacks in healthy people and have suggested the same for those who have suffered some heart damage.

The UCSF research suggests that alcohol achieves the same results as a medical procedure called preconditioning, which has been performed in the laboratory. Doctors found previously that by briefly interrupting the flow of blood through arteries to the heart just before a heart attack, they could sharply cut damage to the organ. The brief cutoff apparently preconditions the muscle to prepare for a longer stoppage.

Moderate daily alcohol use apparently achieves the same thing, Figueredo said. "By having your glass of wine with dinner each night, you set this protection in motion - your heart has a memory of this for the next 24 hours," he said.

The study, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that alcohol may work through receptors on the heart cell surface for a compound called adenosine, which regulates heart function.

Figueredo said the next step in his team's research is to look for a substitute for alcohol that would accomplish the same result. "We're trying to understand this protective mechanism of alcohol," he said. "If we can mimic it, we can perhaps create a drug that someone will be able to take once or twice a day."