Health Risks of Alcohol: Part 1

It’s no secret that the consequences of our addictive behavior go beyond the personal and truly reap havoc with our bodies. Both our mental and physical health can be significantly damaged by alcohol and sometimes it’s important to step back and look closely at the health risks of continuing our addictive behavior.  Here are just 6 conditions that can be linked to chronic heavy drinking.

Anemia

Heavy drinking can cause the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to drop significantly. This condition (Anemia) can trigger a host of symptoms. Some of them including fatigue, shortness of breath and light headedness.

Cancer

As stated by Jurgen Rehm, PhD chairman of the University of Toronto’s department of addiction policy and senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health. “Habitual drinking increases the risk of cancer”. Like most scientists he believes the increase risk comes when the body converts alcohol into acetaldehyde, a potent carcinogen. Cancer research also links alcohol use to mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, breast and colorectal region cancer. These risks rise even higher in heavy drinks who also smoke.

Cardiovascular disease

Heavy drinking, especially binge drinking which is an extremely common form of alcohol abuse with many, makes platelets more likely to clump together into blood clots can lead to heart attack or stroke. In a study published in 2005 by Harvard researchers, it was found that binge drinking doubled the risk of death among people who initially survived a heart attack.

Heavy drinking also has the potential to cause cardiomyopathy. This is a potentially deadly condition in which the heart muscle weakens and eventually fails. It also causes heart rhythm abnormalities such as atrial and ventricular fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is when the heart’s upper chambers (atria) twitch chaotically rather than constrict rhythmically. This can cause blood clots that may trigger a stroke. Ventricular fibrillation can cause chaotic twitching in the heart’s main pumping chambers (ventricles). It may cause rapid loss of consciousness and without immediate treatment, death.

Cirrhosis

Alcohol is extremely toxic to liver cells. A common result of heavy drinking is the development of cirrhosis which is a sometimes lethal condition in which the liver itself is so heavily scarred that it is no longer able to function. It’s difficult to predict which drinkers will develop cirrhosis. Some heavy drinkers will spend their entire lives abusing alcohol and never develop the conditions while some who do not drink very much do in fact get it. For some undetermined reason, women seem to be more vulnerable than men.

Dementia

As people grow older, their brains begin to shrink. This happens on average at a rate of about 1.9% per decade. That’s considered normal, however heavy drinking greatly increases the speed of shrinkage of certain key regions in the brain resulting in memory loss and other symptoms of dementia.

Heavy drinking may also lead to subtle yet potentially debilitating deficits in the ability to plan, judge, solve problems and perform other aspects of “executive function” which are the abilities that allow us to maximize our function as humans.

In addition, heavy drinking can also cause such significant nutritional deficiencies that they themselves trigger other forms of dementia.

Depression

It’s long been known that heavy drinking plays a heavy part in the depression of many. Surely we’ve all found that though it has the potential to make you feel better short term, the long term effects cause a more drastic slip into sadness, depression and anxiety.

Aside from the changes  in our brain chemistry caused by alcohol abuse, we tend to make further bad life choices while under the influence that often make our living conditions and circumstances worse. It truly Is a downward spiral that we owe it to ourselves to get out of.

More to come soon..