It can also lead to a wide range of health problems, including high blood pressure and heart disease, liver disease, and increased risk of cancer. Alcohol can either activate or suppress the immune system depending on, for example, how much is consumed and how concentrated it is in the various tissues and organs. That dual action predisposes heavy drinkers both to increased infection and to chronic inflammation.
Your gut microbiome is a hotbed of bacteria that help keep your digestive system happy and healthy. The trillions of microbes how to stop drinking out of boredom in your colon and large and small intestines are critical to proper digestion. In reality, there’s no evidence that drinking beer (or your alcoholic beverages of choice) actually contributes to belly fat. Eventually, you can develop permanent and irreversible scarring in your liver, which is called cirrhosis. We need lots of different ‘good’ bacteria in our gastrointestinal (GI) tract for healthy immune function.
And prolonged alcohol use can lead to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. If alcohol continues to accumulate in your system, it can destroy cells and, eventually, damage your organs. “With COVID-19, alcohol is likely to interfere with an individual’s ability to clear SARS-CoV-2 and cause people to suffer worse outcomes, including ARDS, which commonly results in death,” Edelman said. When someone is exposed to a virus, the body mounts an immune response to attack and kill the foreign pathogen. Alcohol has been flying off the shelves as people try to combat boredom during lockdown, with some reports estimating that alcoholic beverage sales surged by 55 percent toward the end of March. Dr. Sengupta shares some of the not-so-obvious alcohol and violence statistics effects that alcohol has on your body.
Cirrhosis, on the other hand, is irreversible and can lead to liver failure and liver cancer, even if you abstain from alcohol. You probably already know that excessive drinking can affect you in more ways than one. That said, evidence also shows that even smaller amounts of alcohol can affect the immune system. Similarly, alcohol can trigger inflammation in the gut and destroy the microorganisms that live in the intestine and maintain immune system health. For more information about alcohol’s effects on the body, please visit the Interactive Body feature on NIAAA’s College Drinking Prevention website.
How Alcohol Can Affect Your Immune System
But even low stopping duloxetine cold turkey amounts of daily drinking and prolonged and heavy use of alcohol can lead to significant problems for your digestive system. “Some people think of the effects of alcohol as only something to be worried about if you’re living with alcohol use disorder, which was formerly called alcoholism,” Dr. Sengupta says. The World Health Organization (WHO) and U.S. surgeon general have warned people to avoid drinking too much alcohol during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alcohol’s pro- and anti-inflammatory effects on the immune system
Often, the alcohol-provoked lung damage goes undetected until a second insult, such as a respiratory infection, leads to more severe lung diseases than those seen in nondrinkers. There are potentially two ways in which low-to-moderate alcohol consumption can modulate SCFA production. As alcohol is largely metabolized within the GI tract, it is a prime factor to impact gut microbiome composition, gut immune system and downstream systemic immune communications with other organs.
- This may increase alcohol consumption and risky decisionmaking and decrease behavioral flexibility, thereby promoting and sustaining high levels of drinking.
- Another potential mechanism of low-to-moderate alcohol’s protection in autoimmune diseases may rely on alcohol’s important role in the metabolism of essential PUFAs, such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA).103,105 These PUFAs can reduce reactive oxygen species formation and act as anti-inflammatory molecules.
- Alcohol is well known for promoting systemic inflammation and aggravating multiple chronic health conditions.
- Your gut microbiome is a hotbed of bacteria that help keep your digestive system happy and healthy.
- The white blood cells, tissues and organs that make up our body’s immune system are designed to fight off infections, disease and toxins.
Cancer risk
Normal immune function hinges on bidirectional communication of immune cells with nonimmune cells at the local level, as well as crosstalk between the brain and the periphery. These different layers of interaction make validation of the mechanisms by which alcohol affects immune function challenging. Significant differences between the immune system of the mouse—the primary model organism used in immune studies—and that of humans also complicate the translation of experimental results from these animals to humans. Moreover, the wide-ranging roles of the immune system present significant challenges for designing interventions that target immune pathways without producing undesirable side effects. An important way in which alcohol may beneficially impact autoimmune inflammation is via its effects on fatty acid metabolism in the gut.
Although most research has focused on the effects of heavy alcohol consumption on the immune system, several studies have also confirmed that even moderate consumption can have significant effects on the immune system. For example, one study found that women who consumed 330 mL of beer for 30 days exhibited a significant increase in leukocytes, mature CD3+ T-cells, neutrophils, and basophils. In contrast, men who consumed a similarly moderate amount of beer for the same period exhibited a significant increase in basophils alone. Each of these events is mediated by the activation of nuclear factor kappa B (NFκB), which can be inhibited by alcohol consumption and thus prevent the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines.
