Health Harms

After a session of heavy drinking take a break for 48 hours to let your body recover.

Immediate effects

When you drink too much or too quickly, for a start you'll experience:

• Dizziness
• Being sick
• Falling over
• Headaches
• Hangover

You might hope to sleep it all off but the most common side effect of excessive drinking is a hangover. These vary according to how much you drank and how well your body processes alcohol.

Hangovers can leave you tired and unable to concentrate. This can lower your performance at work and your ability to carry out complicated or physically demanding tasks. It's also more difficult to control your moods.

Other short-term effects

• Sexual difficulties like impotence
• Slowed breathing and heartbeat
• Loss of consciousness
• Increased risk of accident and injury
• Regular over-drinking

Most people who suffer from health problems because of their drinking are not alcoholics, but rather are those who drink heavily over a number of years. Many suffer few immediate consequences of their drinking, but cumulatively it takes its toll. 6,000 deaths from coronary heart disease in men each year are directly due to alcohol. And 400 of the 1,700 deaths from mouth cancer per year are linked to heavy drinking - that's nearly one in four.

In England and Wales, alcohol misuse leads to some 33,000 hospital admissions each year for alcohol-related liver disease.

Regularly drinking more than the recommended number of units over a long period can lead to complications like:

• Certain types of cancer, especially breast cancer
• Memory loss, brain damage or even dementia
• Increased risk of heart disease and stroke
• Liver disease, such as cirrhosis and liver cancer
• Stomach damage
• Potentially fatal alcohol poisoning
• Other Iong-term effects
• As you get older, the risks increase. Not only is your body less able to process alcohol, but if you fall you are more likely to seriously injure yourself. You may also notice as time passes:
• Smaller genitals
• Lower sperm count
• Loss of body hair
• Irregular periods and lower fertility
• Damage to an unborn child
• Your appearance can suffer:
• Weight gain from alcohol's high calorie content
• Skin problems

Did you know?

Older drinkers are more likely to feel the effects the following morning, due to changes in the body that develop with age such as a decrease in body water content and an increase in body fat content. Even from the age of 20 onwards, lean body mass (muscle) also reduces, leading to higher blood alcohol concentration for the same amount of alcohol consumed.

 

Source: NHS Know your Limits Website www.units.nhs.uk