Whether you drink a little or a lot, one large study found that drinking can increase the risk of up to 60 diseases.
Cirrhosis, stroke, and cancer are well-established and well-established risks from drinking too much alcohol. However, after analyzing data from half a million men living in China, Oxford University researchers have found that the habit can also increase the risk of gout and cataracts. .
Among the 60 diseases are other disorders that have never been proven to be linked to alcohol, such as fractures, lung cancer and circulatory diseases.
Experts say the findings suggest that alcohol consumption is linked to a wider range of diseases than previous research.
Excessive alcohol consumption is thought to be responsible for about 3 million deaths worldwide each year. The NHS recommends that men and women drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week. One unit is regulated as half a liter of beer or a small glass of wine.
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However, the World Health Organization (WHO) states that there is no safe threshold for drinking alcohol. This argument is becoming the subject of fierce debate. Some previous studies have suggested that a glass of wine or a pint of beer a day can prevent many diseases.
The team at Oxford University collaborated with colleagues at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences to conduct the study.
They pulled medical records from a Chinese database containing the health information of more than 512.000 adults, with an average age of 52. The records included information about their drinking habits.
About 30% of men drink alcohol regularly – at least once a week, while this percentage is only 2% of women.
As a result, women were used as a control group to confirm that the high risk of disease in men was due to alcohol consumption rather than a mechanism involving genetic variations.
They analyzed 12 years of medical records to assess how alcohol affects the risk of developing 207 different diseases. Some are not medical illnesses like traffic accidents and injuries.
The findings, published in the journal Nature Medicine, show that alcohol use increases the risk of 60 diseases in men in China.
These include 28 diseases each WHO has identified as alcohol-related, such as cancers of the liver, bowel and rectum.
However, they also found 33 more previously unidentified diseases, such as gout, cataracts, bone fractures and stomach ulcers.
Certain drinking habits such as drinking every day, binge drinking or drinking alcohol outside of meals especially increase the risk of some serious diseases such as cirrhosis.
The team also identified dose-dependent associations: every four drinks per day was associated with a 14% higher risk of alcohol-related illness.
The same frequency of drinking also increased the risk of developing 6 newly identified diseases by 33% by XNUMX%.
In addition, every four drinks per day is associated with a more than double the risk of cirrhosis and gout.
Men who drink regularly have a higher risk of hospitalization and disease than men who drink only occasionally.
This study also demonstrates the effect of alcohol consumption on disease risk in populations around the world.
Professor Liming Li, study co-author at Peking University, said: "Alcohol consumption is on the rise in China, especially among men. This large-scale collaborative study demonstrates the need to strengthen alcohol control policies in China.”
Meanwhile, Associate Professor Iona Millwood at Oxford Public Health said it was clear that alcohol use was one of the most important risk factors for poor health, both in China and globally. This is important for implementing prevention strategies in different countries.
According to VNA/Newspapers
