Alcohol is widely abused around the world. There are millions of people who are addicted to alcohol who may or may not realize the toll that alcohol is having on their health and body. Alcohol consumption is linked to more than 60 diseases. Here we look at some of the ones most prevalent.
Effects of Alcohol on the body in the Short Term:
Alcohol abuse has many harmful effects on the body. The initial effects of alcohol are that it depresses your central nervous system which makes some people initially feel stimulated by this. However as the drinking continues, the effect becomes one of sedation. Alcohol acts to lower your inhibitions and will affect your thoughts, judgment, and emotions. When taken in large quantities, alcohol will impair both your coordination and your speech i.e. you will start slurring and will severely depress the vital centers of your brain. Short-term memory loss and the inability to sleep well can be the result of drinking too much while a life-threatening coma can happen after a bout of binge drinking.
Long Health Effects of Alcohol Abuse
1. Liver Damage:
Liver disorders are common with alcoholism as alcohol is toxic to liver cells. For example, binge drinking can be the cause of alcoholic hepatitis, which is an inflammation of the liver. There are signs and symptoms of this, which can include nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, fever, confusion, and yellowing of the skin. Hepatitis may lead to cirrhosis after years of drinking. This is an irreversible disease and can destroy and scars the tissue of the liver to such a degree it cannot function. Cirrhosis can happen to people who drink large amounts and people who don’t drink very much and for some unknown reason, women are particularly susceptible.
2. Anemia
Heavy drinking can cause the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to be abnormally low. This condition, known as anemia, can trigger a host of symptoms, including tiredness, shortness of breath, and lightheadedness.
3. Gastrointestinal Defects
Alcohol can also cause gastrointestinal problems. This can cause the lining of the stomach to become inflamed and interfere with your body’s ability to absorb B vitamins, specifically thiamin and folic acid. This heavy drinking can also result in damage to your pancreas, which is responsible for producing hormones that keep your metabolism regulated as well as the enzymes that assist the body in digesting proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Chronic pancreatitis causes abdominal pain and persistent diarrhea which is not curable. Some cases of chronic pancreatitis are triggered by gallstones, but up to 60% stem are from alcohol consumption.
4. High Risk Of Cancer
Alcoholism also puts you at an increased risk of developing cancer. Alcoholism has been linked to cancer of the throat, esophagus, liver, larynx (voice box), mouth, colon, breast, and rectum. Scientists believe the increased risk comes when the body converts alcohol into acetaldehyde, a potent carcinogen. Cancer risk rises even higher in heavy drinkers who also use tobacco.
5. Bones
Alcohol abuse can also lead to the interference with producing of new bone. This can lead to bone thinning and more likelihood of fracturing your bones.
6. Neurological Defects
Neurological complications are also possible, as excessive drinking can hurt your nervous system, especially causing your feet and hands to become numb, but it also can assist you in developing dementia and confused or disordered thinking. As people age, their brains shrink, at an average rate of 1.9% per decade. However heavy drinking speeds the shrinkage of certain key regions in the brain, resulting in memory loss and other symptoms of dementia.
In addition to the “general” dementia that stems from brain atrophy, binge drinking can cause nutritional deficiencies so severe that they trigger other forms of dementia.
7. Nerve damage
Heavy drinking can cause a form of nerve damage known as alcoholic neuropathy, which can produce a painful pins-and-needles feeling in the extremities, as well as muscle weakness, incontinence, constipation, erectile dysfunction, and other problems. Alcoholic neuropathy is thought to arise either because alcohol is so toxic to nerve cells, or because nutritional deficiencies attributable to heavy drinking compromise nerve function.
8. Cardiovascular
Heavy drinking, especially binge drinking, makes platelets more likely to clump together to form blood clots, which can lead to a heart attack or a stroke. In a landmark study published in 2005, Harvard researchers found that binge drinking doubled the risk of death among people who initially survived a heart attack.
Heavy drinking can also cause cardiomyopathy which is a potentially deadly condition in which the heart muscle weakens and eventually fails, as well as the heart rhythm abnormalities called atrial and ventricular fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation, in which the heart’s upper chambers (atria) twitch chaotically rather than constrict rhythmically, can cause blood clots that can trigger a stroke. Ventricular fibrillation causes chaotic twitching in the heart’s main pumping chambers (ventricles). It causes rapid loss of consciousness and without immediate treatment, causes death.
Diabetes complications are another issue. Alcohol keeps glucose from being released from your liver and can increase your risk of low blood sugar. If you have diabetes and are taking insulin to lower your level of blood sugar, this is very dangerous.
9. Sexual Organs
For women, alcohol abuse can cause effect your menstruation and in men it can cause erectile dysfunction. If a pregnant woman drinks alcohol, she is taking a very high chance of causing her baby to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Fetal alcohol syndrome results in birth defects, including heart defects, shortening of the eyelids and other physical abnormalities such as having a small head, and having behavioral and cognitive developmental delays.
10. Depression
We all know that heavy drinking often goes hand in hand with depression, but there is debate about whether it’s the drinking that causes depression or the depression that causes people to drink. One theory is that depressed people turned to alcohol in an attempt to “self-medicate” to ease their emotional pain. But another large study in New Zealand showed that it was probably the other way around — that is, heavy drinking led to depression.
11. Seizures
Heavy drinking can cause epilepsy and can even trigger seizures in people who don’t have epilepsy. Drinking has also been reported to interfere with the action of the medications used to treat the disorder.
12. Gout
A painful condition, gout is caused by the formation of uric acid crystals in the joints. While some cases are definitely hereditary, alcohol and other dietary factors appear to play a role. Alcohol also seems to aggravate existing gout cases.
13. High blood pressure
Alcohol may interfere with the sympathetic nervous system, whose role among other things is to control the constriction and dilation of blood vessels in response to for example stress, temperature and exertion. Heavy boozing can cause blood pressure to rise which over time can become chronic. High blood pressure also leads to many other health problems, such as kidney disease, heart disease, and stroke.
14. Infectious Disease
Heavy drinking suppresses the immune system, which makes you more prone to infections, including serious diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases, some of which cause infertility.
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