| Title: | Alcohol consumption in the general population is associated with structural changes in multiple organ systems |
| Journal: | eLife |
| Published: | 1 Jun 2021 |
| Pubmed: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34059199/ |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.65325 |
Publication 4025
WARNING: the interactive features of this website use CSS3, which your browser does not support. To use the full features of this website, please update your browser.
Abstract
Background: Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with damage to various organs, but its multi-organ effects have not been characterised across the usual range of alcohol drinking in a large general population sample.</p>
Methods: We assessed global effect sizes of alcohol consumption on quantitative magnetic resonance imaging phenotypic measures of the brain, heart, aorta, and liver of UK Biobank participants who reported drinking alcohol.</p>
Results: We found a monotonic association of higher alcohol consumption with lower normalised brain volume across the range of alcohol intakes (-1.7 × 10-3 ± 0.76 × 10-3 per doubling of alcohol consumption, p=3.0 × 10-14). Alcohol consumption was also associated directly with measures of left ventricular mass index and left ventricular and atrial volume indices. Liver fat increased by a mean of 0.15% per doubling of alcohol consumption.</p>
Conclusions: Our results imply that there is not a 'safe threshold' below which there are no toxic effects of alcohol. Current public health guidelines concerning alcohol consumption may need to be revisited.</p>
Funding: See acknowledgements.</p>
20 Keywords
- Aged
- Alcohol Drinking
- Alcohol-Induced Disorders
- Aorta
- Brain
- Brain Diseases
- Cardiomyopathy, Alcoholic
- Fatty Liver, Alcoholic
- Female
- Heart
- Humans
- Liver
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging
- Male
- Middle Aged
- Predictive Value of Tests
- Prospective Studies
- Risk Assessment
- Risk Factors
- United Kingdom
7 Authors
- Evangelos Evangelou
- Hideaki Suzuki
- Wenjia Bai
- Raha Pazoki
- He Gao
- Paul M Matthews
- Paul Elliott
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health