BBC Panorama ‘Binge Drinking and Me’ puts a spotlight on alcohol-related liver disease

In a related chart, you can see the share who drink alcohol by gender and age group in the UK. Again, the prevalence of drinking across North Africa and the Middle East is notably lower than elsewhere. Typically, 5 to 10 percent of adults across these regions drank in the preceding Women and Alcoholism year, and in a number of countries, this was below 5 percent. To make this average more understandable, we can express it in bottles of wine. Wine contains around 12% pure alcohol per volume1 so that one liter of wine contains 0.12 liters of pure alcohol. So, a value of 6 liters of pure alcohol per person per year is equivalent to 50 liters of wine.

• “People need to know what is harmful alcohol use and what it does to your body,” Lee said.
• It’s a lot easier to overdrink than many people realise, putting vast numbers of us in danger of alcohol-related illnesses.
• So even as some women drink more, they’re often less likely to get the help they need.
• In many Asian countries, spirits account for most of total alcohol consumption.

Expenditures on alcohol and alcohol consumption by income

• Prenatal alcohol exposure can cause children to experience physical, cognitive, and behavioral problems, any of which can be components of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.
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• Deaths related to excessive alcohol consumption are rapidly rising in the United States, especially among women, a new study finds.
• This data is based on estimates of prevalence and treatment published by the World Health Organization (WHO).
• At the end of this topic page, you will find additional resources and guidance if you, or someone you know, needs support in dealing with alcohol dependency.
• This approach allowed us to examine the trends in alcohol-related deaths before the onset of the pandemic and evaluate the robustness of our findings.
• The study used data from the National Health Interview Survey, administered by the U.S.

In the chart, we see the average consumption (in liters of ethanol) of different beverage types per person in the USA since the mid-nineteenth century. The comparison of this map with the previous maps makes clear that heavy drinking is not necessarily most common in the same countries where alcohol consumption is most common. In 2018, 5.1% of adults engaged in heavy drinking in the past year, 15.5% engaged in moderate drinking, 45.7% engaged in light drinking, and 33.7% did not consume alcohol (Figure 1).

Emotional differences in drinking

• The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), in its Global Burden of Disease study, provides estimates of the number of deaths attributed to the range of risk factors.5 In the visualization, we see the number of deaths per year attributed to each risk factor.
• The map shows heavy drinkers – those who had an episode of heavy drinking in the previous 30 days – as a share of total drinkers (i.e., those who have drunk less than one alcoholic drink in the last 12 months are excluded).
• If liver damage is caught at an early stage, lifestyle changes can potentially reverse existing damage.
• Love Your Liver is the British Liver Trust’s flagship UK-wide campaign to raise awareness of the risk factors of liver disease and encourage people to take steps to improve their liver health.
• In the chart, we see the average consumption (in liters of ethanol) of different beverage types per person in the USA since the mid-nineteenth century.

When Americans do drink, they typically consume more alcohol than is recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which suggest a maximum of one drink per day for women and two for men. Whilst the World Health Organization (WHO) and most national guidelines typically quantify one unit of alcohol as equal to 10 grams of pure alcohol, the metric used as a ‘standard measure’ can vary across countries. The total estimated number of deaths by country from 1990 to 2019 is found here.

Binge drinking, by the numbers

Studies show that women start to have alcohol-related problems sooner and at lower drinking amounts than men and for multiple reasons.3 On average, women weigh less than men. Also, alcohol resides predominantly in body water, and pound for pound, women have less water in their bodies than men. This means that after a woman and a man of the same weight drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman’s blood alcohol concentration (the amount of alcohol in the blood) will tend to be higher, putting her at greater risk for harm.

Global wine consumption

Alcohol sales per capita went up more from 2019 to 2021 than in any two-year period since 1969, according to estimates from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Deaths from excessive alcohol use are also rising, as are deaths where the underlying cause of death was alcohol-related. Alcohol has been linked with over 200 conditions, impacting basically every single organ system. The breakdown of alcohol use disorders by gender for any country can be viewed here; the majority of people with alcohol use disorders – around three-quarters – are male.

We see that the proportion of deaths attributed to alcohol consumption is lower in North Africa and the Middle East and much higher in Eastern Europe. This is given as the share of adults aged 15 years and older who have drunk alcohol within the previous year. As the map shows, the average per capita alcohol consumption varies widely globally. Find out how many people have alcohol use disorder in the United States across age groups and demographics. Unfortunately, women are prone to several conditions that may tempt them to overindulge in alcohol.

• Instead, women and men appear to be moving toward one another in terms of drinking patterns and harms.
• Camille Kezer, M.D., answers questions about alcohol use in women and liver disease.
• Alcohol consumption – whilst a risk factor for a number of health outcomes – typically has the greatest negative impacts when consumed within heavy sessions.