14 • March 11, 2020
The LEGACY
Alcohol is growing as a prime-time killer USN - A. Garcia says he knew he’d gotten lazy in recent years. He started working from home, began drinking a six-pack of IPAs after work “pretty much daily” and embraced “a very couch potato-esque life.” “I definitely drank a lot more than the normal person, but in my mind, I was nowhere near hitting a danger zone because I wasn’t drinking to excess – I was more drinking just habitually, casually,” recalls Garcia, whom U.S. News is not fully identifying to protect his privacy. “I was never ... doing anything wild – it was so boring.” Boring, that is, until Garcia tried to stop drinking in July. Two days later, he was experiencing slight hallucinations – a symptom of alcohol withdrawal – and ultimately headed to the emergency room for
help. It was there that the 37-yearold was diagnosed with cirrhosis, a late stage of liver scarring often tied to chronic alcohol use, and put on the U.S. liver transplant waiting list for an immediate operation. “Luckily I stabilized fairly quickly ... so that option was kind of taken off the table, but still when I left, I was still considered extremely highrisk,” Garcia says. Though his age and his habits may not fit the normal perception of a person suffering the potentially fatal effects of alcohol misuse, national data shows Garcia is not alone, with booze cutting short the lives of those even younger than him at an increasing rate. And while it’s not always clear whether the surge is tied to better measurements or to alcohol consumption itself, experts are concerned.
Between 1999 and 2017, for example, while adults ages 45 to 74 continued to have the highest alcohol-related death rates, those 25 to 34 saw the largest increases over time, according to a study published this year by researchers with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Nearly half of alcohol-related deaths in 2017 were the result of liver disease or overdoses, either from alcohol itself or combined with other drugs. A separate study found that people between the ages of 25 and 34 saw the highest average annual increase – 10.5 percent – in cirrhosis-related deaths of any age group from 2009 to 2016, driven heavily by alcohol use, and the number of deaths from cirrhosis in this age group doubled. The findings stand “in contrast to any other time in recorded history,
so going back through the 70s,” says Dr. Elliot Tapper, lead author of the study and an assistant professor and liver specialist with the University of Michigan and Michigan Medicine. “The immediate reaction that everyone had across the country was, ‘This is what we see,’” Tapper says. “If you round in an American hospital, then you will find not only is alcohol-related disease markedly overrepresented – the chances that you find someone with an alcohol use disorder are very high simply in the population that’s hospitalized – but then two ... the list of patients on which a liver specialist rounds is almost uniformly, at this point, alcohol-related disease and disproportionately young people.” That dynamic is also playing out in the operating room. In a study
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