Poor health is associated with episodic heavy alcohol use: evidence from a National Survey

Alcohol and Self‐Rated Health in a Mediterranean Country: The Role of Average Volume, Drinking Pattern, and Alcohol Dependence

“…They also showed the importance of adjustment for the average consumption, because no differences in self-perceived health were seen between infrequent binge drinkers and no binge drinkers. Other studies (Okosun et al, 2005;Stranges et al, 2006;Volk et al, 1997) have also found that suboptimal health is more frequent among binge drinkers, though they did not take the frequency of binge drinking episodes into account.…”

“…Such differences between countries might be partly explained by binge drinking, because it is associated with worse subjective health (Okoro et al, 2004;Okosun et al, 2005;Volk et al, 1997) and is more frequent in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon than in Mediterranean countries, in which only a modest part of the excessive alcohol consumption takes the form of binge drinking (Valencia-Martı´n et al, 2007). As yet, however, no study has estimated the impact of binge drinking on self-rated health in Mediterranean countries.…”

“…As yet, however, no study has estimated the impact of binge drinking on self-rated health in Mediterranean countries. Furthermore, in the studies conducted in Anglo-Saxon countries (Okoro et al, 2004;Okosun et al, 2005;Volk et al, 1997), average alcohol consumption and binge drinking has not been taken into account simultaneously, so that their independent impact on self-rated health is unknown. It is also possible that part of the differences between countries in the association of alcohol with self-rated health may be due to the drinking context because, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon world, in Mediterranean countries most alcohol consumption takes place at mealtimes (Hupkens et al, 1993;Sieri et al, 2002).…”

Co-occurrence of obesity and patterns of alcohol use associated with elevated serum hepatic enzymes in US adults

“…In addition, information about certain hazardous drinking patterns, such as binge drinking (i.e., 5 or more drinks on one occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on one occasion for women), was not collected in this survey and thus could not be evaluated in this report. Several previous studies suggested the importance of separating former drinkers from lifetime abstainers in order to avoid parameter biases and inferential errors, because many former drinkers stopped drinking because of poor health conditions (McIntosh, 2008;Okosun et al, 2005;Stranges et al, 2006;Valencia-Martin et al, 2009). However, we did not detect any significant difference in levels of elevated hepatic enzymes between former drinkers and lifetime abstainers (data not shown).…”

The importance of alcohol misuse, malnutrition and genetic susceptibility on brain growth and plasticity

“…Alcohol misuse in pregnancy is also frequently associated with other conditions that can potentially increase the brain damage such as poor nutrition and smoking (Chen et al, 1998;Culverhouse et al, 2005;Gianoulakis, 1998;Lieber, 2003;Okosun et al, 2005;Raine, 2002). An extensive experimental and clinical literature shows that alcohol misuse results in fetal brain neurotoxicity associated with life-long behavioural, social and cognitive impairments (Chen et al, 2003;Goodlett et al, 2005;Guerri, 2002;Olney, 2004;Warren et al, 2001).…”