The youngest should not drink any alcohol

by time news

A total of 1.34 billion people consumed harmful amounts of alcohol (1.03 billion men and 0.312 million women) in 2020 according to the Global Burden of Disease report which concludes that because alcohol consumption has no health benefits , but only risks, people between 15 and 39 years should not drink a drop.

The document focuses on this point since, according to the data, 59.1% of people who consumed harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020 were between 15 and 39 years old and 76.7% were men.

The authors note that, given the complex relationship between alcohol and disease and the different background rates of disease around the world, the risks of alcohol use differ by age and geographic location.

So for adults over 40 years old, health risks from alcohol use vary by age and region. Consuming a small amount of alcohol (for example, drinking one to two glasses of red wine) for people in this age group may provide some health benefits, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes.

The authors call for guidelines on alcohol consumption to be revised to emphasize age-specific levels of consumption, stressing that the level of alcohol consumption recommended by many existing guidelines is too high for young people in all regions. They also demand that the policies target men under 40, who are the most likely to use alcohol in a harmful way.

Young people face greater health risks from alcohol consumption than adults, details this report published in “The Lancet”.

Using estimates of alcohol consumption in 204 countries, the researchers calculated that 1.34 billion people drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020.

“Our message is simple: young people should not drink, but older people can benefit from drinking small amounts. Although it is unrealistic to think that young adults will abstain from drinking, we believe it is important to communicate the latest evidence so that everyone can make informed decisions about their health,” said lead author, Emmanuela Gakidouof Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) from the University of Washington School of Medicine (USA).

The authors acknowledge some limitations of this work, such as the fact that patterns of alcohol consumption were not examined. Therefore, it does not distinguish between individuals who drink infrequently on an episodic basis and those who consume the same amount of alcohol over several days. Alcohol consumption was also self-reported, which could have introduced bias, and the study was unable to include data on consumption during the Covid-19 pandemic due to pandemic-related delays in routine data collection, which also could have affected these estimates.

In a linked comment, Robyn Burton and Nick Sheron of King’s College London (who were not involved in the study) say: “These results appear to contradict an earlier estimate by this group published in The Lancet, which emphasized that any alcohol consumption, regardless of the quantity, causes health losses in all populations”.

A study of 21,000 people says there is growing evidence showing that even moderate alcohol consumption negatively affects the brain.

The publication of this report coincides with another work in “PLOS Medicine” that concludes that the consumption of seven or more units of alcohol per week is associated with higher levels of iron in the brain, which has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and is a potential mechanism for alcohol-related cognitive decline.

According to this published study of nearly 21,000 people, there is mounting evidence to show that even moderate alcohol consumption can negatively affect brain health.

Given the prevalence of moderate alcohol consumption, even small associations can have a substantial impact on entire populations, and there could be benefits to interventions to reduce consumption in the general population.

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