Alcohol Facts and Statistics National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIAAA

When Gillian Tietz began drinking in graduate school, she found a glass of wine helped ease her stress. Anxiety kept her up at night, she says, and she started having suicidal thoughts. “It’s not only that we’re seeing women drinking more, but that they’re really being affected by this physically and mental health-wise,” says Dawn Sugarman, a research psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, who has studied addiction in women. Societal pressures and other community factors may influence people’s decisions to take certain health risks.

Understanding Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

Further, this review only included studies assessing sex differences and not gender differences, per se. Three decades of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies describe patterns of brain structural abnormalities characteristic of chronic, heavy drinking.81,82 Despite the rich literature on neuroimaging in AUD, the mainstay of studies does not address sex differences. The focus of this section is on the research in women with AUD and starts with studies using conventional structural MRI to quantify regional brain volumes; also summarized are studies using magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging to assess the microstructural integrity of white matter fibers and finally functional MRI done in the task activation state. Emotion decoding skills are crucial when assessing one’s immediate social environment, providing valuable information regarding others’ internal affective state, enabling behavioral adaptation according to others’ thoughts and intentions, and facilitating social interactions in daily life.

Consequences of women’s unhealthy alcohol use

“It’s all very glamorized,” Johnston notes, “but alcohol marketing never shows the runny mascara the next day, the heaving stomach. There are downsides to drinking we don’t talk about.” Those who frequently rely on alcohol to manage stress or who regularly experience symptoms of overconsumption—such as lethargy or foggy thinking—should talk to their primary care physician, Patel says. A doctor may recommend seeing a therapist to learn alternative stress-management techniques or joining a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Federal guidelines recommend that women who want to drink consume no more than one serving a Women and Alcoholism day (two for men). But from a health perspective, less—or none—is a better target, Patel suggests. But most of the deaths reflect the toll from longer-term consumption, Karaye says, including from its eventual impact on the liver, the pancreas, or heart.

Alcohol Consumption Among Women Is on the Rise

• “It’s not only that we’re seeing women drinking more, but that they’re really being affected by this physically and mental health-wise,” says Dawn Sugarman, a research psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, who has studied addiction in women.
• She moved back home and was soon taking a shot or two of vodka each morning before heading to the office for her finance job, followed by two more drinks at lunch.
• For starters, women are more likely to be depressed and anxious than men — and are also more commonly victims of sexual violence — and drinking can be one way that women cope with these experiences.
• Women may have an accelerated path to medical and psychosocial problems, even though they might have consumed less alcohol overall and for a shorter period of time compared to men.

Sex differences outside of AUD typically note better performance in women than men in decoding emotional facial expression and in performing tasks of social cognition such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test or the Faux Pas Recognition Test.59-63 Taken together, these findings suggest a potential resilience to social cognition disorders in women. This section reviews whether AUD disrupts this protective factor as a whole or interferes with selective processes. Though men are more likely to have a drinking problem, there are unique physical and emotional factors that can lead women to have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Women have lower amounts of the enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, needed to break their drinks down, so they are left with higher levels of a substance that is toxic to organs like the liver. Moreover, women have less body water to dilute the alcohol they’ve consumed — the end result is that alcohol in their systems becomes more concentrated, Karaye said.

Short Takes With NIAAA: What Are Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

Previous studies found that women are drinking greater amounts of alcohol, with binging becoming increasingly common, and that may at least partially explain the rising rates of complications like cirrhosis, he said. While drinking is still killing more men than women, the rate of alcohol-related deaths is rising faster among women, according to the report published Friday in JAMA Network Open. Booze also doesn’t play nice with a lot of medications women may be taking, putting them at risk for a host of dangerous reactions. “Antianxiety pills, like Xanax and Valium, can enhance the effects of alcohol and impair your alertness and ability to balance, putting you at risk for falling,” says Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist and medical director at the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health at the NYU Langone Health medical center. That means it takes less time and less alcohol for women to get intoxicated and experience the bad effects of booze.

Even more, that test could help providers and consumers understand if their alcohol intake, whatever that may be, is placing them at a risk for specific diseases (such as liver or heart disease). She adds that more research is necessary to make these tests more accurate and widely available. There is no known safe amount of alcohol consumption for women who are pregnant or might become pregnant.

Ozempic has a surprising side effect: Drinking less alcohol

Even so, the prospect of being diagnosed with alcohol-related liver disease wasn’t her first concern. Research shows women suffer health consequences of alcohol — liver disease, heart disease and cancer — more quickly than men and even with lower levels of consumption. She sees a future where evaluating a person’s risk for alcohol-related diseases can be tailored to him or her as an individual. “Think of a test that’s as simple as a pregnancy test, but instead of only measuring acute alcohol content (like the current blood alcohol tests) it can reflect a person’s long-term alcohol intake,” says Dr. Grant.

• Taken together, these studies demonstrate the relation between chronic heavy drinking and structural and functional brain abnormalities in men and women; however, due to their cross-sectional nature, these studies cannot determine whether AUD-related brain dysmorphology was caused by drinking, was pre-existing, or both.
• Also in this category are older adults, anyone planning to drive a vehicle or operate machinery, and individuals who participate in activities that require skill, coordination, and alertness.

General differences in how people’s bodies handle alcohol

Although the prevalence of drinking remains higher in men than women, the gender gap is narrowing. This narrative review focuses on the cognitive sequelae of alcohol consumption in women. Studies of acute alcohol effects on cognition indicate that women typically perform worse than men on tasks requiring divided attention, memory, and decision-making. Beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption on cognition have been reported; however, a number of studies have cautioned that other factors may be driving that association.