Alcohol worries

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDDec 28 2010

Festival season usually means excessive and binge drinking leading to accidents and other health concerns say experts. With the outrage of anti-alcohol groups laws may be tightened but many experts feel that it is not the alcohol that needs to be focused on but the people who over-indulge.

According to figures compiled for the National Drug Survey, most people aged 12 to 17 say accessing alcohol is either easy or very easy. They often rely on older siblings to buy alcohol legally and pass it on. Even more disappointing, in at least 34 per cent of cases, children under 18 were getting alcohol from their parents. This has to stop to prevent alcohol related unpleasantness.

Alcohol is related to bad and sometimes non-relentable and unavoidable hangovers and also tens of thousands of deaths every year - from drunken car crashes, mostly, but also alcohol poisoning, liver disease and various types of accidents. In October, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out new warnings against binge drinking, which they label as a cause in more than 79,000 deaths a year in the United States. The CDC reported that more than 15 percent of adults engage in binge drinking every year.

Keith Humphreys, a research scientist and professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine speaking on the purported health benefits of alcohol said, “If you’re looking to reduce your risk of a stroke or heart attack, take a baby aspirin a day. It's more effective than alcohol and there’s no risk of addiction… These studies on the health benefits just let those of us who like a glass of wine now and then justify it.” Data from Nurses’ Health Study, a database of more than 84,000 nurses who have been followed for more than 20 years to study a variety of health behaviours and outcomes also speaks of alcohol health benefits. Last month this study found that women who had about two drinks a day were up to 28 percent more likely to live to age 70 or older than women who drank only once or twice a week, or who drank in occasional binges. Another study, also released last month, found that women who had about one drink a day had a 20 percent lower risk of stroke compared with women who never drank.