Drinking Every Day May Increase Risk of Liver Cirrhosis

If you like to believe that one drink a day would not harm you, you’re mistaken.A new research presented at The International Liver Congress 2015 at Vienna in Austria, has found that moving from moderate to heavy daily drinking, up to one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men, increases the risk of liver cirrhosis.To reach this conclusion, researchers analysed the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, which included parameters of alcohol consumption and drinking patterns from 193 countries. According to them, excessive alcohol drinking is the most common cause of cirrhosis worldwide. It also indicated that burden of cirrhosis caused by alcohol has increased by 11.13 percent when moving from the moderate to heavy daily drinking classification. Half of all cases of cirrhosis are caused by alcohol.According to WHO's "Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health", around six percent of global deaths are caused by drinking alcohol, the majority from alcoholic cirrhosis - scarring of the liver as a result of continuous, long-term liver damage."The presence of heavy daily drinkers in a population most significantly and independently influences the weight of alcohol in a country's cirrhosis burden," said one of the researchers Eva Stein from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.(Fatty Liver Disease May Lead to Cancer)Most studies assessing the prevalence of alcohol abuse as a risk factor for alcoholic cirrhosis focus on total annual amount drunk per person. However, the researchers highlight that clinical studies suggest that it is a high daily consumption which is the strongest predictor of alcoholic cirrhosis.(Drinking Alcohol Regularly Increases Stroke Risk in Men)Cirrhosis progresses slowly during which the healthy liver tissue is replaced with scar tissue. This prevents the liver from functioning properly; it blocks the flow of blood and affects the processing of hormones, nutrients and toxins. It also disturbs the production of proteins and other chemicals by the liver. Hepatitis C, fatty liver, and alcohol abuse are the most common causes of live cirrhosis.
With inputs from IANS