The Heart

Heavy drinking increases the risk of high blood pressure and its complications of heart attack and stroke. Alcohol can cause irregularity of the heartbeat, known as atrial fibrillation, which in itself can increase the risk of clotting and stroke. Alcohol can directly damage the heart muscle itself causing a condition called cardiomyopathy, whereby the heart loses its ability to pump blood strongly; this can result in heart failure.

Cancers

Alcohol can increase the risk of many cancers, including cancer of the mouth and throat, and cancer of the oesophagus (food pipe), stomach, liver and pancreas gland. Excess alcohol may also have a role in increasing your risk of bowel or colon cancer as well as prostate cancer.

Alcohol and Liver Disease

The liver is the main organ responsible for filtering and removing alcohol from the body. The liver can metabolise and break down approximately 1 unit of alcohol per hour. However, if you drink alcohol faster than your liver can break it down then the amount of alcohol in your bloodstream rises.

Alcohol can affect the liver in three ways. Firstly, many people who drink excess alcohol develop what is known as a fatty liver. This is where you get a build-up of fat within the liver cells. Fatty liver is often reversible if you reduce your alcohol intake to within safe limits. However, sometimes people with fatty liver can go on to develop inflammation of the liver, known as alcoholic hepatitis.

Alcoholic hepatitis, secondly, is where the liver becomes swollen and inflamed. In mild cases this may not cause any symptoms and can simply be detected with a blood test, which may show an elevation of some of the liver enzymes. In more severe cases, though, you can feel unwell and develop nausea, yellow jaundice and sometimes pain over the liver area. If alcoholic hepatitis is severe, then the liver can shut down and go into liver failure, which can cause retention of fluid, life-threatening bleeding, confusion, coma and often death.

Finally, heavy drinking over a long period of time can lead to the development of alcoholic cirrhosis. Cirrhosis is a condition in which the normal soft, smooth tissue of the liver becomes replaced with hard, fibrous scar tissue. Some people who never drink alcohol can get cirrhosis, for example, as a result of viruses or other disorders of the immune system. However, it is felt that about one in ten heavy drinkers over a long period of time will get cirrhosis. Unfortunately, the scarring that occurs in the liver is irreversible. In severe cases, when the liver scarring is extensive, the only treatment option may be a liver transplant.