Two More Reasons to Avoid Binge Drinking

You know binge drinking is foolish, but now there are a couple of more good reasons to shun it. First, an article in the journal Stroke examines the effect of different drinking patterns on the risk of stroke, independent of the average alcohol intake.

Almost 16,000 Finnish adults aged 24 to 64 with information on their alcohol intake were followed for 9 to 10 years. They were classified as light, moderate, or heavy drinkers, based on their overall intake. Binge drinking was defined as at least 6 drinks of the same type (i.e. beer, wine, or liquor); 3,500 of the participants (1,000 women and 2,500 men) had binge drinking patterns.

Of the 250 total strokes recorded, 70 were hemorrhagic and 180 were ischemic. The total stroke risk was 1.85 times greater in bingers than in non-bingers; the ischemic stroke risk was about twice as great, but fell to about 1.5 times as great after adjustments were made for all the factors that might influence the outcome. Hemorrhagic stroke, on the other hand, wasn't linked to binge drinking.

The other problem with binge drinking concerns bone health. It's well known that repeated binge drinking results over time results in osteoporosis. Reporting in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Loyola University researchers have now found out why. They discovered bone-specific clusters of genes that are disrupted by binge alcohol intake. Some of these genes had increases in their RNA (ribonucleic acid), others had decreased RNA.

This result in bone-related growth was discovered in rats. However, the researchers have had a series of convincing studies that show the rat to be a good model of alcohol-related osteoporosis, so the findings may be considered ‘solid'.

I could go on about the problems with binge drinking - but you'd do better to go to the CDC website.