Alcohol consumption is known to cause liver damage. Yet the specifics of alcohol-induced liver injury can differ depending on the pattern of drinking.
New rodent findings show that chronic drinking causes more injury – as measured by gene-expression changes – to the liver than acute or binge drinking.
Results will be published in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.
"Different patterns of drinking can] produce a different set or pattern of gene expression by the liver because of adaptation by the liver which occurs when the same level of blood alcohol is repeated over and over again," explained Samuel W. French, Distinguished Professor of pathology at the UCLA School of Medicine, and chief of anatomic pathology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Basically, the liver "learns" or "remembers" its response to alcohol.
"Unfortunately, these adaptive changes in gene expression are injurious to the liver and are furthermore persistent in the liver even when alcohol drinking has stopped," French added. "This is why people who develop liver disease after chronic alcohol abuse continue to be sick from liver damage for many months after they have stopped drinking. In fact, they actually get worse when they stop drinking because their liver is programmed epigenetically to work under the influence of alcohol. Think of it as deleterious conditioning and a learning process for the liver."
"Rodents do differ from humans in some of their responses to alcohol because they are rodents, not humans," said Terrence M. Donohue, Jr., a research scientist in the Liver Study Unit at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "However, overall these results could potentially be applicable to humans and it's likely that they are, as both rodents and humans are mammals."