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Within the medical and scientific communities, there is a broad consensus regarding alcoholism as a disease state. For example, the American Medical Association considers alcohol a drug and states that "drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite often devastating consequences.
An alcoholic will continue to drink despite serious family, health, or legal problems. Like many other diseases, alcoholism is chronic, meaning that it lasts a person's lifetime; it usually follows a predictable course; and it has symptoms. The risk for developing alcoholism is influenced both by a person's genes and by his or her lifestyle." [62]
Alcohol use is a major cause of preventable liver disease worldwide, and alcoholic liver disease is the main alcohol-related chronic medical illness. [6] Millions of people of all ages, from adolescents to the elderly, engage in unhealthy drinking. [7] In the United States, excessive alcohol use costs more than $249 billion annually. [8]
Alcohol myopia is a cognitive-physiological theory on alcohol use disorder in which many of alcohol's social and stress-reducing effects, which may underlie its addictive capacity, are explained as a consequence of alcohol's narrowing of perceptual and cognitive functioning.
Dipsomania is a historical term describing a medical condition involving an uncontrollable craving for alcohol or other drugs. [1] In the 19th century, the term dipsomania was used to refer to a variety of alcohol-related problems, most of which are known today as alcohol use disorder. Dipsomania is occasionally still used to describe a ...
The level of ethanol consumption that minimizes the risk of disease, injury, and death is subject to some controversy. [16] Several studies have found a J-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption and health, [17] [18] [2] [19] meaning that risk is minimized at a certain (non-zero) consumption level, and drinking below or above this level increases risk, with the risk level of drinking a ...
Marchiafava–Bignami disease (MBD) is a progressive neurological disease of alcohol use disorder, characterized by corpus callosum demyelination and necrosis and subsequent atrophy. The disease was first described in 1903 by the Italian pathologists Amico Bignami and Ettore Marchiafava in an Italian Chianti drinker.
The term 'alcohol dependence' has replaced 'alcoholism' as a term in order that individuals do not internalize the idea of cure and disease, but can approach alcohol as a chemical they may depend upon to cope with outside pressures. The contemporary definition of alcohol dependence is still based upon early research.