When including never-drinkers and ex-drinkers, we reproduced previously reported U-shaped associations of alcohol consumption with total cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality (appendix p 31). However, we observed notable differences in baseline characteristics between never drinkers and current drinkers (eg, in relation to sex, ethnicity, smoking, and diabetes status; appendix p 12), supporting the validity of focusing on current drinkers in our main analysis. We recorded similar findings to those reported above in sensitivity analyses that involved the following approaches: used multiple imputation rather than complete-case analysis (appendix p 32); used fractional polynomials (appendix p 34); used a fixed-effect meta-analysis (appendix p 35); included studies that recorded fewer than five events for a particular outcome (appendix p 36); provided separate analyses of men and women (appendix p 17, appendix p 26); omitted outcomes recorded in the initial 5 years of follow-up (appendix p 18); excluded participants with diabetes or other known chronic diseases at baseline (appendix p 18); and restricted the analyses to studies that recorded both non-fatal and fatal endpoints (appendix p 37). Associations of baseline alcohol consumption with all-cause
