Studies of alcohol’s effects on health have offered contradictory findings, with some suggesting a glass of red wine a day is beneficial and others saying even a drop of booze is too much. A new review attempting to clarify the risks finds more than 60 diseases, based on the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, are 100 percent attributable to consuming alcohol. But the review also finds that some of the damage can be slowed or reversed by cutting down or quitting drinking.
Sinclair Carr, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the first author on the study, worked with a team to review a range of studies on alcohol and challenge their potential assumptions and biases. In an interview edited for clarity and length, Carr and senior author Jürgen Rehm of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, discussed their findings.
What was the purpose of this study?
Rehm: This study is an update to a series of reviews that inform global assessments — such as the Global Burden of Disease Study and the WHO’s Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health — which aim to quantify how much risk factors like alcohol and tobacco contribute to the global burden of disease and injury. It became clear that there wasn’t enough evidence about the various risks of alcohol, so we began to look at two different dimensions of alcohol that are relevant for health: the average level of drinking (i.e., how many drinks per day, week, etc.) and the patterns of drinking (i.e., the different occasions during which one consumes alcohol). We’ve been doing updates of this review roughly every seven years, but the hope was that this update would reconcile some of the classic epidemiological practices with the newer approach of Mendelian randomization.
