Is Your Social Drinking Hurting Your Liver? A Scottish Woman Opens About Developing Chronic Liver Disease

When the 31-year-old Scotland-based woman, and a BBC-journalist Hazel Martin went to the doctor's complaining about her tiredness, she was unaware of the underlying reason. After the blood test, she was suggested for a liver scan, and it turned out that she was at a high risk of developing a liver disease. The doctors warned her that if she drank any more, she could also die, reported BBC.

However, she never drank regularly. "I didn’t drink every day, I never drank alone, and I drank because I enjoyed it as a social activity, not because I felt alcohol-dependent,” she said. What the doctor described was as binge drinking. As per doctors and experts, binge drinking with a weekly consumption of less than 14 units in a week will increase one's risk of liver disease.

For women, it is around six units of alcohol in one sitting, which is equivalent to two large glasses of wine. In the UK, while the problem is bigger for men, women under the age of 45 are also dying due to alcohol-related liver diseases (ARLD) as per the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures from 2001-22. In the US, every 1 in 4 women has engaged in binge drinking.

A fibroscan, a non-invasive ultrasound, is performed to measure liver stiffness. A reading of 7 kPa (a unit used to measure the level of oxygen in the blood) or below is considered normal. For Hazel, the reading came out at 10.2.

It is also known as social drinking or casual drinking. As per the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), binge drinking is a pattern of drinking alcohol that brings blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08%—or 0.08 grams of alcohol per deciliter—or more.

NIAAA prescribes that for men, 5 drinks within 2 hours, and for women it is 4 drinks in about the same time, described as the limit. For teens and youth, the number of drinks for girls is 3 and 5 for boys.

As per the 2023 National Survey on Drug Abuse and Health, about 61.4 million people in the United States aged between 12 and older report binge drinking. The number, however in teens and preteens is decreasing. Similarly, the number of people in the young adults category between 18 to 25 is also decreasing, but it still remains high, at 28.7%. For older adults, people at the age of 65 and older report binge drinking.

Binge drinking can have many negative impacts on your health, including blackouts and overdoses. It is also associated with unsafe sexual behaviour and risk of sexually transmitted infections and unintentional pregnancy. Binge drinking is also one of the leading reasons for deaths by falls, burns, drownings, and car crashes.

Some studies say that even one episode of binge drinking can dysfunctional one's immune system and lead to acute pancreatitis- inflammation of the pancreas. Alcohol misuse can also lead to chronic liver diseases, and cancers, which may also spread to the head and neck. It is also a leading cause of oesophagal, colorectal or breast cancer.

As per the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 1,78,000 deaths in the US that resulted from excessive alcohol use between 2020 and 2021. Of these, 1/3 of deaths were caused by binge drinking.

Binge drinking can also influence adolescent years. Research suggests that repeated episodes of binge drinking during the teen years can hinder the development of the brain and lead to deficits in social, attention, memory and other cognitive functions.