You spend a lot of time drinking, thinking about it, or recovering from its effects. For example, you recognize that your alcohol use is damaging your marriage, making your depression worse, or causing health problems, but you continue to drink anyway. While someone with alcoholism will tend to drink every day, others confine their drinking to short but heavy bursts. Binge drinking is often associated with young adults and college students who drink heavily at parties and then abstain for the rest of the week.
However, plenty of older adults also binge drink, especially those over Binge drinking is defined as drinking so much that your blood alcohol level reaches the legal limit of intoxication within a couple of hours. For men, that means consuming five or more drinks within about two hours, and for women, four or more drinks within a similar period. These levels can be easy to hit if you sink shots, play drinking games, drink cocktails containing multiple servings of alcohol, or otherwise lose track of your intake.
Other indication that you may have a binge-drinking problem include drinking excessively at weekends, holidays, and special occasions, frequently drinking more than you planned, and often forgetting what you said or did while drinking. Binge drinking can have many of the same long-term effects on your health, relationships, and finances as other types of problem drinking. Binge drinking can lead to reckless behavior such as violence, having unprotected sex, and driving under the influence.
Binge drinking can also lead to alcohol poisoning, a serious and sometimes deadly condition. Consuming too much alcohol, too quickly, can slow your breathing and heart rate, lower your body temperature, and cause confusion, vomiting, seizures, unconsciousness, and even death.
Denial is one of the biggest obstacles to getting help for alcohol abuse and alcoholism. The desire to drink is so strong that the mind finds many ways to rationalize drinking, even when the consequences are obvious. By keeping you from looking honestly at your behavior and its negative effects, denial also exacerbates alcohol-related problems with work, finances, and relationships. While work, relationship, and financial stresses happen to everyone, an overall pattern of deterioration and blaming others may be a sign of trouble.
But you are deceiving yourself if you think that your drinking hurts no one else but you. Alcoholism affects everyone around you—especially the people closest to you. Your problem is their problem. Fact: Alcoholism is NOT defined by what you drink, when you drink it, or even how much you drink. If your drinking is causing problems in your home or work life, you have a drinking problem—whether you drink daily or only on the weekends, down shots of tequila or stick to wine, drink three bottles of beers a day or three bottles of whiskey.
Many alcoholics are able to hold down jobs, get through school, and provide for their families. Some are even able to excel. Over time, the effects will catch up with you. Fact: Alcohol is a drug, and alcoholism is every bit as damaging as drug addiction.
Alcohol addiction causes changes in the body and brain, and long-term alcohol abuse can have devastating effects on your health, your career, and your relationships. Alcoholics go through physical withdrawal when they stop drinking, just like drug users experience when they quit.
It takes tremendous strength and courage to face alcohol abuse and alcoholism head on. Reaching out for support is the second step. Whether you choose to go to rehab, rely on self-help programs, get therapy, or take a self-directed treatment approach , support is essential. Recovering from alcohol addiction is much easier when you have people you can lean on for encouragement, comfort, and guidance. Those problems could include depression , an inability to manage stress , an unresolved trauma from your childhood, or any number of mental health issues.
But you will be in a healthier position to finally address them and seek the help you need. Admitting a loved one has a problem with alcohol can be painful for the whole family, not just the person drinking. There is help and support available for both you and your loved one.
The choice is up to them. You may also benefit from joining a group such as Al-Anon, a free peer support group for families coping with alcoholism.
Listening to others with the same challenges can serve as a tremendous source of comfort and support. Discovering your child is drinking can generate fear, confusion, and anger in parents. Explain your concerns and make it clear that your concern comes from a place of love. Lay down rules and consequences: Your teen should understand that drinking alcohol comes with specific consequences.
Encourage other interests and social activities. Expose your teen to healthy hobbies and activities, such as team sports, Scouts, and after-school clubs. Talk to your child about underlying issues.
Drinking can result from other problems. Is your child having trouble fitting in? Has there been a recent major change, like a move or divorce, which is causing stress?
Whether you want to cut back or stop drinking altogether, there are plenty of steps you can take to help yourself regain control of both your drinking and your life. Read: Overcoming Alcohol Addiction. Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders. The animals with the modified gene showed distinct changes in alcohol-related behaviors, such as a preference for alcohol over water.
Other approaches focus on the fact that many of the genes identified to date are part of larger networks of genes that interact with one another rather than act independently.
Such studies found that numerous alcohol-related gene networks participate in important brain-signaling pathways. Another new line of research was triggered when scientists observed that gene activity may be altered by proteins called histones that help to package and organize DNA in the cells. These so-called epigenetic changes alter the way the DNA is expressed over time, either increasing or decreasing gene activity. As described above, researchers are learning more and more about how your genetic makeup can influence your drinking behavior and its consequences and which genes may put you at increased risk of alcoholism.
But does this mean that if you inherit a certain combination of genes from your parents, you are destined to become an alcoholic? People with the same genetic makeup may be more or less likely to develop alcoholism depending on their environment and life circumstances. Researchers can study the interactions between genes and the environment and the relative impact of each through a variety of direct and indirect approaches.
Participants in one prevention program designed for youth were less likely to engage in high-risk behavior, such as drinking, even though they had a high-risk genetic background. The bottom line is that genes alone do not determine our destiny—lifestyle choices and other environmental factors have a substantial impact. Assessing the genetic risk for alcohol use disorders. Genetic and environmental contributions to alcohol dependence risk in a national twin sample: Consistency of findings in women and men.
Psychological Medicine 27 6 —, PMID: The behavioral genetics of alcoholism. Current Directions in Psychological Science —, Identifying genetic variation for alcohol dependence. Progress and promise of genome-wide association studies for human complex trait genetics. Genetics 2 —, Bridging animal and human models: Translating from and to animal genetics.
Discovering genes involved in alcohol dependence and other responses: Role of animal models. Ethanol withdrawal in mice bred to be genetically prone or resistant to ethanol withdrawal seizures. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 1 —, Alcohol withdrawal severity in inbred mouse Mus musculus strains.
Behavioral Neuroscience 4 —, Journal of Neuroscience 22 9 —, Mpdz is a quantitative trait gene for drug withdrawal seizures. Nature Neuroscience 7 7 —, Genes encoding enzymes involved in ethanol metabolism. Contribution of the alcohol dehydrogenase-1B genotype and oral microorganisms to high salivary acetaldehyde concentrations in Japanese alcoholic men.
International Journal of Cancer 5 —, ADH1B is associated with alcohol dependence and alcohol consumption in populations of European and African ancestry.
Molecular Psychiatry 17 4 —, Interaction between the functional polymorphisms of the alcohol-metabolism genes in protection against alcoholism. American Journal of Human Genetics 65 3 —, Psychopharmacology Berlin 4 —, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 34 12 —, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior 90 1 —, Immune function genes, genetics, and the neurobiology of addiction.
Induction of innate immune genes in brain create the neurobiology of addiction. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 25 Suppl. Toward understanding the genetics of alcohol drinking through transcriptome meta-analysis. Not exactly. Because these people's brains don't get the very important "stop drinking" signal, they're more likely to drink more and more as time goes on, the researchers say--and eventually, to develop a full-on drinking problem later in life.
We're all about enjoying wine with dinner, celebrating the Super Bowl with a couple of beers, or relaxing with friends and cocktails! But remember to keep track of how much you're drinking: Even if you feel fine, it's easy to overdo the limit of what's actually healthy. Keep it to one or two drinks at a time and you'll save calories and keep your flu defenses up , too!
How much do you drink per week--or on weekends? Will these new findings affect that amount?
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