If you drink every day, or almost every day, you might notice that you catch colds, flu or other illnesses more frequently than people who don’t drink. That’s because alcohol can weaken your immune system, slow healing and make your body more susceptible to infection. Your body breaks alcohol down into a chemical called acetaldehyde, which damages your DNA.
Derangements in Fatty Acid Metabolism and Transport
As a result, people who are intoxicated tend not to eat as healthily as they would if they weren’t under the influence. Having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at a party here and there isn’t going to destroy your gut. But even low amounts of daily drinking and prolonged and heavy use of alcohol can lead to significant problems for your digestive system. Steatotic liver disease develops in about 90% of people who drink more blood alcohol content (bac) depends on than 1.5 to 2 ounces of alcohol per day. The proportion of cardiomyopathy cases attributable to alcohol abuse has ranged from 23 to 40 percent (Piano and Phillips 2014).
Can alcohol consumption lead to weight gain?
Senior Cardiac Nurse Christopher Allen finds out more from Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, Consultant Physician and Gastroenterologist at Royal Liverpool University Hospitals. Sign up to get tips for living a healthy lifestyle, with ways to fight inflammation and improve cognitive health, plus the latest advances in preventative medicine, diet and exercise, pain relief, blood pressure and cholesterol management, and more. Whether it’s a glass of red wine with your turkey or toasting champagne for the new year, alcohol definitely becomes more present during the holiday season. And while enjoying celebratory spirits in moderation is alright for most people, it’s important to be aware you can fall victim to holiday heart syndrome if you overdo it. This is when overeating and overindulging in alcohol lead to an irregular heartbeat. And sure, we’ve all had a night here or there where we’ve had one too many and we know it.
In many ways, your medical history (and present) can tell you a lot about your future with alcohol. That means, if you’re living with other medical conditions and/or taking certain medications, this will all have an impact on how alcohol affects you. People who are in recovery from an alcohol use disorder should also avoid alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous is available almost everywhere and provides a place to openly and nonjudgmentally discuss alcohol issues with others who have alcohol use disorder.
- Medications such as statins that act directly on the liver can cause further damage when combined with alcohol.
- It’s possible that light to moderate drinkers have stronger social ties, which in turn provide resilience against stress.
- “The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures.
- Shape of the relation between alcohol consumption and CVD categories based on current evidence syntheses.
Ischaemic Heart Disease
Alcohol consumption has been shown to have complex, and sometimes paradoxical, associations with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Several hundred epidemiological studies on this topic have been published in recent decades. Methodological shortcomings, such as exposure classification and measurement, reference groups, and confounding variables (measured or unmeasured) are discussed. Based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the evidence seems to indicate non-linear relationships with many CVDs. Large-scale longitudinal epidemiological studies with multiple detailed exposure and outcome measurements, and the extensive assessment of genetic and confounding variables, are necessary to elucidate these associations further. Conflicting associations depending on the exposure measurement and CVD outcome are hard to reconcile, and make clinical and public health recommendations difficult.
In addition, there was no evidence of nitrative damage in mice bred to disrupt (i.e., knock out) the gene for angiotensin I receptor (AT1-KO) that had been given ethanol for a similar length of time (Tan et al. 2012). Both experimental approaches also prevented accumulation of ethanol-induced scarring (collagen and fibronectin); apoptotic cell death; and changes in the size, shape, and function of the heart after injury to heart muscle (ventricular remodeling). Evidence of oxidative stress is found after short periods of alcohol consumption (2 to 18 weeks), at least in animal models. These data suggest that antioxidant defense mechanisms that attempt to protect the heart against oxidative damage appear to be initiated soon after drinking alcohol. Also, as noted below, data from other studies demonstrate the protective role of administered antioxidants, such as a synthetic compound that mimics the native superoxide dismutase enzyme, called a superoxide dismutase mimetic. This suggests a direct or indirect role for ethanol-mediated oxidative stress in the heart (Jiang et al. 2012; Tan et al. 2012).
Dr. Sengupta shares some of the not-so-obvious effects that alcohol has on your body. And that’s on top of the toll that alcohol use can take on relationships, not to mention the potential for financial strain and legal troubles. You probably already know that excessive drinking can affect you in more ways than one. These usually come with a warning sticker from your pharmacy that tells you not to drink while you take them. But check with your pharmacist if you aren’t sure about your medicine.