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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]
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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]
Alcoholic ketoacidosis is caused by complex physiology that is the result of prolonged and heavy alcohol intake, usually in the setting of poor nutrition. Chronic alcohol use can cause depleted hepatic glycogen stores and ethanol metabolism further impairs gluconeogenesis .
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.
Chronic alcohol exposure decreases the number of proliferating cells that are radial glia-like, preneuronal, and intermediate types, while not affecting early neuronal type cells; suggesting ethanol treatment alters the precursor cell pool. Furthermore, there is a greater decrease in differentiation and immature neurons than there is in ...