Even moderate alcohol intake can raise risk for over 60 diseases: Study

LONDON: Even if you consume alcohol moderately, you could be vulnerable to over 60 diseases, including many that were previously not known to be, such as cataracts and gastric ulcers, warned a new study.

Alcohol consumption is estimated to be responsible for about three million deaths worldwide each year, and it is increasing in many low and middle-income countries.

Researchers from universities of Oxford in the UK and Peking in China followed 512,000 adults from urban and rural areas in China for 12 years and assessed the health effects of alcohol use on over 200 different diseases.

Their findings, published in Nature Medicine, showed that among 207 diseases studied, self-reported alcohol intake was associated with higher risks of 61 diseases in men. The study participants who were majorly men. Only two per cent of women were found to drink alcohol regularly.

This included 28 diseases previously established by the World Health Organisation as alcohol-related, such as liver cirrhosis, stroke, and several gastrointestinal cancers, and 33 diseases not previously established as alcohol-related, such as gout, cataract, some fractures, and gastric ulcer.

There were over 1.1 million hospitalisations recorded in the study, and men who had ever drank alcohol regularly had significantly higher risk of developing any disease and experienced more frequent stays in hospital, compared with men who had only drunk alcohol occasionally.

Certain drinking patterns, such as drinking daily, drinking in heavy "binge" episodes, or drinking outside mealtimes, particularly increased the risks of certain diseases, particularly liver cirrhosis, the results showed.

Further, a genetic analysis to probe alcohol's link with diseases showed that every four drinks per day was associated with a 14 per cent higher risk of established alcohol-related diseases, six per cent higher risk of diseases not previously known to be alcohol-related, and over two-fold higher risk of liver cirrhosis and gout.

A higher alcohol intake was significantly associated with increased risk of stroke in a dose-response manner, but showed no increased risk with ischemic heart disease (IHD). Moreover, moderate drinking (i.e. one-two drinks/day) did not have any protective effects against IHD.

"This study provides important causal evidence of the scale of alcohol-related harms, which is critical to inform prevention strategies in different countries," said Professor Zhengming Chen, Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford Population Health.

As less than two per cent of women in the study drank regularly, women in this study provided a useful control group in the genetic analyses, which helped confirm that the excess disease risks in men were caused by drinking alcohol, not by some other mechanisms related to the genetic variants, the team said.