Consuming Alcohol Moderately Can Also Lead To 60 Vulnerable Diseases

Hyderabad, June 11 (Maxim News):  Even if you consume alcohol moderately, you could be vulnerable to over 60 diseases, including many that were previously not known to be, such as cataracts and gastric ulcers, warned a new study. 

Alcohol consumption is estimated to be responsible for about three million deaths worldwide each year, and it is increasing in many low and middle income countries.

Researchers from Universities of Oxford in the UK and Peking in China followed 512,000 adults from urban and rural areas in China for 12 years and assessed the health effects of alcohol use on over 200 different diseases. 

The findings, published in Nature Medicine, showed that among 207 diseases studied, self reported alcohol intake was associated with higher risks of 61 diseases in men.  The study participants who were majorly men.  Only two percent of women were found to drink alcohol regularly. 

This included 28 diseases previously established by the World Health Organisation as alcohol related, such as liver cirrhosis, stroke and several gastrointestinal cancers and 33 diseas not previously established as alcohol related, such as gout, cataract, some fractures and gastric ulcer. 

There were over 1.1 million hospitalisations recorded in the study and men who had ever drank alcohol regularly had significantly higher risk of developing any disease and experienced more frequent stays in hospital, compared with men who had only drunk alcohol occasionally. 

Certain drinking patterns, such as drinking daily, drinking in heavy “binge” episodes, or drinking outside mealtimes, particularly increased the risks of certain diseases, particularly liver cirrhosis, the results showed. 

Further, a genetic analysis to probe alcohol’s link with diseases showed that every four drinks per day was associated with a 14 per cent higher risk of established alcohol-related diseases, six per cent higher risk of diseases not previously known to be alcohol-related and over two-fold higher risk of liver cirrhosis and gout. 

As less than two per cent of women in the study drank regularly, women in this study provided a useful control group in the genetic analyses, which helped confirm that the excess disease risks in men were caused by drinking alcohol, not by some other mechanisms related to the genetic variants, the team said.  (Maxim News) 

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