Alcohol increases autoimmune disease risk, worsens symptoms

If you don't know what an autoimmune disease is, you haven't had the distinct pleasure of hearing from your physician that you have one… your fortunate. It's just like it sounds: A body's immune system goes on auto and instead of fighting intruders only, it attacks healthy cells by mistake. You hear about them every day. Rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, MS, celiac disease, and lupus are some of the more common autoimmune diseases, but there are more than 80 of them. (YouTube video, episode #51 here)

Alcohol increases risk of these disorders and worsens many symptoms. Here's how.

1) Stress. Alcohol is considered by many to relieve stress, however, alcoholics have a higher level of the stress hormone cortisol – I cover that extensively in Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud. A 2002 study led by French researcher Arnaud Cenac indicated that major stress caused by or self-medicated by alcohol in the previous 24 months increases risk 140 percent.

2) Alcohol use increases blood levels of immunoglobulins. It's a mouthful, but these proteins are used by the immune system to identify and neutralize bacteria and viruses. Although an increase in a given antibody is usually associated with a specific immunity, such as the immunity resulting from a flu shot, alcoholics with these greatly increased antibody levels are often immunodeficient because the proteins go postal looking for something to neutralize.

3) Alcohol consumption increases whole body inflammation by reducing the effectiveness of antioxidants such as vitamins A, C and E, according to studies by the University René Descartes in France. In other words, inflammation is a key symptom of autoimmune disease and alcohol will make it worse.

Fact is, there isn't anything a drink won't make worse. When it comes to autoimmune diseases a 2006 study indicated the risk of acquiring these chronic conditions increases 65 percent with smoking… and 98 percent with alcohol consumption.

(see the full article)

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on risky myths of about "healthy" drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the NEW book, Adding Fire to the Fuel, is now available. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.

Three ways alcohol brings on asthma attacks

Share episode #50's YouTube video or read the transcript below.  Follow this link for full article.

With a rash of new inhaler-type treatments, more effective drugs like kinase inhibitors, and the promise of immunotherapy, what gets lost in the shuffle for asthmatics is what brings on an asthmatic attack. Some asthmatics learn the hard way that alcohol can set off their asthma. A study by the University of Western Australia published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology reports that alcohol brings on the symptoms of asthma. Forty-three percent of study patients had allergic reactions to various alcoholic drinks, while 33 percent said the alcohol alone brought on asthmatic reactions like wheezing and coughing. One in four had to hit the inhaler after drinking.

Asthma attacks triggered by alcohol reportedly came on in less than an hour, were moderate in severity and more common in women. People who took oral steroids had more reactions, and so did those who were children when they were originally diagnosed asthmatic.

Alcohol doesn't cause asthma, it worsens asthma symptoms. The reactions could be the result of the alcohol on the body as well as the sulfites found in wine and some spirits and malted beverages. Wine was the most frequent trigger in this study, red wine being the most common trigger, followed by white wine. Sulfites seldom bother non-asthmatics.

Another reason alcohol can be a trigger: Boozing it up can cause acid reflux and stomach fluid can bubble up into air passages causing swelling and the wheezing. Beer isn't off the hook. Fermented drinks are complex combinations of naturally occurring chemicals that resemble histamines. Asthmatics may react with asthma symptoms. Even non-asthmatics react to histamines and get a stuffy nose from beer excess – thus the term “having a snoot full.” Another reason sobriety is a better thing to have, than to lack.

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on risky myths of about "healthy" drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the NEW book, Adding Fire to the Fuel, is now available. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.

Alcohol's pricetag? Enough for every citizen to get a free 48 in. HDTV each year

Drinking alcohol is a cultural norm in this country and most of the planet. Has been for a long time. And that isn't likely to change much in my lifetime. The Sobriety :60+ episodes look at the various health consequences for the drinker, and some of safety concerns for anyone around the drinker. (Watch and share this new episode.) The monetary consequences are something everyone shares: Drinkers and non-drinkers alike. The numbers get complicated, because the drug Americans enjoy and defend so vigorously, also costs the most in health and hard dollars. But there are a few ways to simplify the discussion.

Each drink consumed has a median cost of $1.91 in economic harm (lost productivity, health care costs, property damage and criminal justice system expenses). That's according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So the drinker pays for that in alcohol tax, right? No. Not even drinking the way overpriced hotel room mini-bar beverages does anyone pony up $1.91 in taxes per drink. The median paid in tax per drink is less than a quarter. To put it another way, how much I drink is everyone's business, because what the government has to pay, we all pay anyway.

Even if drinkers bore the full $1.91, everyone else still pays. Look at lost productivity. Showing up late, never, hungover or just without your A-game. Someone has to step in or step up, but it doesn't always happen that way. That costs the company, so the company has to charge more for its goods or services. Lost productivity, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is more than 70 percent of the $224 billion annual costs of alcohol use in the United States. We all pay… no matter if we shop Walmart or Macy's.

The all-in number is staggering at $224 billion a year. Not a single penny of this whopping total reflects pain and suffering of everyone around the drinker, or the drinker himself. $224 billion is enough to give everyone – drinker or non-drinker – every man, woman and child in the U.S., a nice, new, 48-inch LED HDTV every year. Of course, when you quit drinking, you could just buy yourself one with the money you're not spending at the liquor store.

View the whole article or share the YouTube video.

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on risky myths of about "healthy" drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the NEW book, Adding Fire to the Fuel, is now available. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.

Keys to early sobriety success

A common error made by those who've never lived a day in their lives challenged by alcohol is that all someone who has a drinking problem needs to do is just stop drinking. There's some sort of finish line in their minds. Those of us who've quit or struggled to stay sober know with certainty there is no finish line.

It is a progressive, disease without a cure. The quit date is just a start.

If you quit as a New Year's resolution, by the Fourth of Dry July, biologically, your body has begun to repair some damage. Insomnia, headaches, dizziness, fogginess, trouble with balance, problems with hand/eye coordination and reflexes are in the rear-view mirror or at least a whole lot better for most recoverers in that six months. But a lot rides on four factors:

1) Diet and exercise

2) Stress management

3) Depression care

and of course 4) the severity of the drinking prior to the quit date.

Nothing can be done about that last one: Nobody has the luxury of rewriting history. But the first three require attention in those first six months and beyond. Diet and exercise are crucial: Neither got more attention while drinking. If you do nothing else, eat veggies and fruit and take a daily walk. Doing so will help with stress management and depression care.

On the stress side, alcoholics have a higher level of the stress hormone cortisol, as detailed in Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud. Non-alcoholics and alcoholics alike drink for the same reason, to alleviate stress. You have a hole in your routine now that you've taken alcohol out of it. Plug something into that hole, whether it is exercise, spirituality, self-help meetings like 12-step groups or Women for Sobriety, etc.

Depression is a chicken and egg thing for alcoholics: How much was there before the alcohol and how much was caused by the alcohol? Let a professional help. Talking is cathartic, especially in recovery. And so is a balanced brain chemistry. Hard-line 12-steppers say you cannot take an anti-depressant and call yourself sober. (Archaic thinking… based on more bullcrap than you'd find at a rodeo.) Trust me, those dinosaurs are hard to come by and none of them know the first thing about the neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin. Just find a different meeting and follow a doctor's orders, including anti-depressants as prescribed. Most of the older recipes are available as generics for $4 these days.

Post-acute withdrawal can last a while – six to sixty months – but not everyone goes through it, and it beats the alternative of going to your own funeral. Quit in Dry July and imagine where you'll be by Christmas.

See the entire transcript with video or share the YouTube video. 

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on risky myths of about "healthy" drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the NEW book, Adding Fire to the Fuel, is now available. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.

The Eyes Have It: Vermont study connects eye color and alcoholism

People with blue eyes might have a greater chance of becoming alcoholics, according to a new study by genetic researchers at the University of Vermont. The work is the first to make a direct connection between a person’s eye color and alcohol dependence and appears in the July 1 2015 issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics.

The study of 1,263 genetic profiles contributes another piece of evidence that alcohol dependency has a genetic foundation. The study profiles were pulled from a database that only contains genetic profiles of people diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness, which includes an addiction to, or dependence on, drugs or alcohol. Li and associates filtered the database for patients with alcohol addiction or dependence and European ancestry. European Americans with light eye colors, including blue, green and gray, had higher incidences of alcohol dependency than those with dark brown eyes, and that blue eyes were most strongly associated with the condition. The data showed that people with blue eyes were also more likely to have genes associated with alcohol dependence.

Previous research indicated that eye color can be associated with all sorts of specific health conditions. Recovery book, What the Early Worm Gets, also indicated human genome study results implicate flaws in chomosomes 4q and 11 in a higher risk for the disease of alcoholism and contributed to the variability of alcoholism from person to person. Georgia State University concluded fifteen years ago that people with lighter eyes consumed more alcohol. The Vermont researchers now connect eye color to higher probability of the disease.

Geneticists have also known for a while that many people of Asian descent have a different version of the aldehyde dehydrogenase, the enzyme which metabolizes alcohol. Asians commonly have dark eye coloring and have a very low incidence of alcohol dependence and the disease of alcoholism. That isn't to say there aren't alcoholics of Asian descent or that those with dark eyes won't/can't be alcoholic, only that statistically (and genetically) the prevalence is lower than light-eyed men and women of European ancestry. “These are complex disorders,” lead researcher Dawei Li says. “There are many genes, and there are many environmental triggers.”

(see entire article)

Visit alcohologist.com for a replay of CBS Sports' Power Up Your Health featuring Scott Stevens.  Host Ed Forteau led a discussion on risky myths of about "healthy" drinking.  Lucy Pireel's "All That's Written" included a feature on Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud called "When alcohol doesn't work for you anymore."  Details on the third literary award for Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud also can be found on www.alcohologist.com, plus the NEW book, Adding Fire to the Fuel, is now available. Download the FREE Alcohology app in the Google PlayStore today.