Health risks
Alcohol can harm your health. Even a couple of glasses every night raises your risks.
Here are just some of the health risks of drinking alcohol:
Regular drinking increases your risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) which kills more than 160,000 people in the UK every year. CVD is a range of conditions that affect your heart and circulation, including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and vascular dementia.
Drinking can raise your blood pressure and cause weight gain – both big risk factors for heart attacks and strokes. Drinking can also weaken the heart muscle, which means the heart can’t pump blood as efficiently. This can cause death through heart failure.
Alcohol raises the risks of at least seven types of cancer – of the breast, bowel, mouth, larynx, oesophagus, upper throat and liver.
The fact is that you don’t need to be a heavy drinker to be more at risk – any level of regular drinking raises the risks of cancer. Find out more about the link between alcohol and cancer.
Regular drinking, even in small amounts, can raise your risk of stroke. And if you’ve had a stroke, alcohol could increase your risk of another stroke.
This is because alcohol contributes to a number of medical conditions that are risk factors for stroke, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, being overweight, an irregular heartbeat and liver damage.
Regularly drinking can raise your blood pressure. High blood pressure is the most important risk factor for stroke.
More than 1 in 4 adults nationally are living with high blood pressure. If you drink regularly, limiting your alcohol intake can help lower your blood pressure.
Every time we drink alcohol, our liver has to filter it in order to break it down and remove it from the body. Drinking alcohol over a long period of time can result in damage to our liver, ranging from fatty liver to cirrhosis.
Alcohol is the leading cause of liver disease in the UK. Drinking too much alcohol over a long period of time means the liver doesn’t get a chance to recover. This can result in serious and permanent damage as well as liver cancer.
Some people drink to try and help manage stress, anxiety, depression or other mental health problems. However the effects are short lived and alcohol can worsen the symptoms of many mental health problems.
Regularly drinking alcohol affects the chemistry of the brain and can increase the risk of low mood, anxiety and depression. It can stop us sleeping well and make us feel more tired and sluggish.
Alcohol is full of calories so reducing your drinking can help you lose weight.
Two standard glasses of wine or bottles of lager have around 300 calories – the same as a burger and would take a half hour backstroke swim to work off.
Being overweight can lead to many serious health conditions and can increase your risk of heart and circulatory diseases such as heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes and vascular dementia.
Dementia is not a natural part of ageing. It is a set of symptoms that develop when the brain is damaged by disease. Age is the biggest cause but alcohol also increases the risks.
Regularly drinking alcohol exposes the brain to high levels of toxic substances that can damage nerve cells over time and damage the brain in ways which can increase the risk of dementia.
If you drink alcohol during pregnancy you risk causing harm to your baby. Sometimes this can result in mental and physical problems in the baby, called fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD).
FASD can happen when alcohol in the mother’s blood passes to her baby through the placenta.
Your baby cannot process alcohol well, which means it can stay in their body for a long time. Alcohol can damage their brain and body and stop them from developing normally in the womb.
This can result in the loss of the pregnancy. Babies who survive may be left with lifelong problems.
Alcohol can increase the severity of the symptoms of menopause and can be a trigger for hot flushes and night sweats. Alcohol is also a depressant, worsening the mental symptoms of menopause. Reducing alcohol can help ease symptoms and help you to manage weight.
Drinking more than the recommended guidelines can increase the risk of breast cancer in all women, and the risk can increase further in women using HRT.
Drinking alcohol in larger amounts weakens the immune system and reduces our body’s ability to cope with infectious diseases, making you more susceptible to colds and flu and winter vomiting bugs.
