Maybe you are not a regular drinker. A glass at a birthday dinner. A toast at the holidays. A couple of drinks at a party once a month or so. That sounds pretty harmless, right?
According to a large new study, it may not be as harmless as most of us assume, especially for women.
What counts as binge-drinking might surprise you
Most of us picture binge-drinking as something that happens to much younger people. But researchers use a definition that has nothing to do with age and it is lower than most people expect.
The scientific definition used in this research is consuming four or more standard drinks on one occasion for women, and five or more for men. That is the threshold. Not a six-pack. Not a bottle of wine. Just four drinks at one sitting for a woman.
There is an important detail worth knowing about those drink counts. A standard drink is one unit. A double shot of hard liquor counts as two. A larger glass of wine counts as two. So two of those drinks can already put you at the binge-drinking threshold.
What a big study found about the liver
Researchers led by Dr. Vatsalya Vatsalya analyzed data from 43,447 adults. The participants had a median age of 47, and most were women. The data came from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, collected between 1999 and 2020.
What they found was that the odds of advanced liver fibrosis (serious scarring of the liver) increased with how often a person binge-drank. The strongest association showed up among women who binge-drank at least once a month.
Women who binge-drank monthly had 3.34 times the adjusted odds of advanced liver fibrosis compared to those who did not. That is from the study published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Why the liver is worth paying attention to
The liver is actually a remarkable organ. It can regenerate itself under normal circumstances. Researchers note that you could remove 49 percent of an otherwise healthy liver and it would regrow.
But large doses of alcohol at one time can overwhelm the liver. That leads to increased inflammation and accelerated fibrosis, which is scarring of the liver tissue. Scar tissue does not work like healthy tissue, and it greatly reduces the liver’s ability to regenerate. Once scarring becomes advanced, the liver cannot repair itself the way it normally would.
The takeaway for our generation
The research focused on adults with a median age of 47, but older adults are not protected from these effects, if anything, the body becomes less resilient with age, not more.
If this information has you thinking, the good news is that it is never too late. Researchers note that stopping or reducing alcohol allows many parts of the body to begin recovering. The earlier the better, but later still counts.
If you drink occasionally and assume that has kept you safely out of harm’s way, this study is worth a moment of reflection. Sometimes the threshold for risk is closer than we thought.
