We talked with hepatologist Shreya Sengupta, MD, about how alcohol use affects your body and your emotional health. But even moderate alcohol use changes the way your body functions. Alcohol affects your whole body, from your liver and immune system to your brain and mental health
Alcohol-related damage to nerves may also cause heart arrythmias (irregular heartbeat), postural or orthostatic hypotension (a drop in blood pressure due to a change in body position), diarrhea, and erectile dysfunction. The whole body is affected by alcohol use–not just the liver, but also the brain, gut, pancreas, lungs, cardiovascular system, immune system, and more. Excessive alcohol use can harm people who drink and those around them. More information about alcohol and cancer risk is available in the Surgeon General’s advisory. A high rate of consumption can also lead to cirrhosis, gastritis, gout, pancreatitis, hypertension, various forms of cancer, and numerous other illnesses.
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For example, randomized controlled trials show that alcohol consumption raises levels of sex steroid hormones in the blood. Such nuance is rarely captured in broader conversations about alcohol research—or even in observational studies, as researchers don’t always ask about drinking patterns, focusing instead on total consumption. Observational studies can still yield useful information, but they also require researchers to gather data about when and how the alcohol is consumed, since alcohol’s effect on health depends heavily on drinking patterns. And heavy drinking is unequivocally harmful to health.
The cost of excessive alcohol use impacts everyone, whether they drink or not. These effects can also impact the safety and well-being of people around you. Knowing what counts as one standard drink can help you figure out how much alcohol you drink and whether it would be considered excessive. Your tolerance decreases with age, thanks to body changes, health conditions and medications you may take If you need more guidance to quit drinking, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) offers a hotline, 24/7, 365 days a year. Even drinking a little too much (binge drinking) on occasion can set off a chain reaction that affects your well-being.
Eventually, you can develop permanent and irreversible scarring in your liver, which is called cirrhosis. If alcohol continues to accumulate in your system, it can destroy cells and, eventually, damage your organs. 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. More on alcohol Global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol
- Such nuance is rarely captured in broader conversations about alcohol research—or even in observational studies, as researchers don’t always ask about drinking patterns, focusing instead on total consumption.
- If you already drink at low levels and continue to drink, risks for these issues appear to be low.
- That doesn’t mean drinking a lot of alcohol is good for you—but it does suggest that the science around alcohol and health is complex.
- To get a clearer picture of the health effects of alcohol, researchers and journalists must be far more attuned to the nuances of this highly complex issue.
- Your liver detoxifies and removes alcohol from your blood through a process known as oxidation.
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- Observational studies can still yield useful information, but they also require researchers to gather data about when and how the alcohol is consumed, since alcohol’s effect on health depends heavily on drinking patterns.
- In the United States, moderate drinking for healthy adults is different for men and women.
- As an example, a highly cited study of one million women in the United Kingdom found that moderate alcohol consumption—calculated as no more than one drink a day for a woman—increased overall cancer rates.
- You probably already know that excessive drinking can affect you in more ways than one.
- In 2018, the National Institutes of Health ended our trial to study the health effects of alcohol.
Heavy drinking also may result in alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Heavy drinking, including binge drinking, is a high-risk activity. And drinking raises the risk of problems in the digestive system.
Heart health
Intensive care patients are at high risk for falls and injuries when they return home You and your community can take steps to improve everyone’s health and quality of life.
Gut health
Many people drink alcohol as a personal preference, during social activities, or as a part of cultural and religious practices. While the risk is low for moderate intake, the risk goes up as the amount you drink goes up. Drinking alcohol is a health risk regardless of the amount. Heavy alcohol use raises the risk for fractures and even low levels of alcohol intake increase the odds for recurrent gout attacks. People who drink often are more liable to contract diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis than people who do not drink too much. Both acute and chronic heavy use of alcohol can interfere with multiple aspects of the immune response, the result of which can impair the body’s defense against infection, impede recovery from tissue injury, cause inflammation, and contribute to alcohol-related organ damage.
Risks of moderate alcohol use
Even for people who aren’t particularly heavy drinkers. Cirrhosis, on the other hand, is irreversible and can lead to liver failure and liver cancer, even if you abstain from alcohol. With continued alcohol use, steatotic liver disease can lead to liver fibrosis. When your liver finishes that process, alcohol gets turned into water and carbon dioxide. Your liver detoxifies and removes alcohol from your blood through a process known as oxidation. Dr. Sengupta shares some of the not-so-obvious effects that alcohol has on your body.
Liver
Get the latest in health news delivered to your inbox! Once you’ve cut back on your drinking (so you’re at or below the recommended guidelines), examine your drinking habits regularly to see if you’re maintaining this level of drinking. Some of these strategies — such as watching for peer pressure, keeping busy, asking for support, being aware of temptation, and being persistent — can also be helpful for people who want to give up alcohol completely.
One major challenge in this field is the lack of large, long-term, high-quality studies. But the increase was driven nearly entirely by breast cancer. Newer studies are drinking when bored not necessarily better than older research.
There is also evidence that alcohol can disrupt or delay puberty. For example, alcohol misuse is linked to peripheral neuropathy, a condition that commonly occurs in people with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD) and can cause numbness in the arms and legs and painful burning in the feet. In addition to its effects on the brain, alcohol also affects the peripheral nervous system, which comprises the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. More information about alcohol’s effects on the brain is available on NIAAA’s topic page on Alcohol and The Brain. Keep reading for more information on how alcohol can affect your body.
And prolonged alcohol use can lead to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. That’s because alcohol can weaken your immune system, slow healing and make your body more susceptible to infection. 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.
“We see lower levels of a specific kind of white blood cells called lymphocytes in people who drink heavily for long periods of time,” Dr. Sengupta reports. But even low amounts of daily drinking and prolonged and heavy use of alcohol can lead to significant problems for your digestive system. In reality, there’s no evidence that drinking beer (or your alcoholic beverages of choice) actually contributes to belly fat. In some situations, the risk of drinking any amount of alcohol is high.
To get a clearer picture of the health effects of alcohol, researchers and journalists must be far more attuned to the nuances of this highly complex issue. Longer and larger experimental trials have been used to test full diets, like the Mediterranean diet, and are routinely conducted to test new pharmaceuticals (or new uses for existing medications), but they’ve never been done to analyze alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, some authors of studies suggesting alcohol is unhealthy have received money from anti-alcohol organizations. We have been researching the health effects of alcohol for a combined 60 years. If you have concerns about your drinking, talk with your health care provider.
Alcoholic beverages
“That can leave them more vulnerable to infectious diseases.” Damaged DNA can cause a cell to grow out of control, which results in cancerous tumors. But prolonged alcohol abuse can lead to chronic (long-term) pancreatitis, which can be severe. But wait, you may be thinking, what about those headlines that claim red wine is supposed to be good for my heart? Warnings from the World Heart Federation go so far as to state that no amount of alcohol is safe for your ticker. They also help fend off inflammation and support healthy metabolism.
