Alcohol Abuse Advice

Effects of Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a terrible debilitating disease that affects people of all ages and from every race and gender. Alcoholics come in all shapes, sizes and occupations too. Doctors, Lawyers, Ships Captains, Commercial Airline Pilots and just about any other occupation you can imagine have alcoholics in their midst. But what is it that makes them susceptible to alcohol? Why are they addicted to it in the first place? Good question. Let’s look into this a bit further.

Researcher’s have looked at alcohol from many different angles over the years and, although there’s no definite answer to this problem, most believe that it comes from our bloodline. Somewhere in our family, at one time anyway, there was one alcoholic or possibly several alcoholics in the family. This could be from both sides of your family or just one side. It could even be a parent, which is very common. Wherever it came from, you must learn to get a hold of the problem and put the bottle down before the disease progresses.

Some people are just born with an acquired taste for alcoholic beverages. Some even say that they “crave” it. One thing is for sure and that is they need to put it down before it ends their life at an early age. You see, alcoholism goes in different stages. One day you may be hanging out, having a few beers with your friends and the worst that may happen is you wake up with a hangover or do something stupid while you were drunk, you know, the old lampshade on the head routine? But as you continue this pattern over time, your body and brain begin to change. You actually become a different person. The electrons in your brain begin firing in a different pattern and you begin to go through a personality change. For some people this is potentially dangerous as they may become violent, depressed or psychotic. If they were already depressed or suffered from depression before they began to drink heavily, then they will become much worse.

Alcohol is a natural “depressant” and pouring large quantities of it into a person that already suffers from depression is also potentially dangerous. This person may become suicidal or things may be seemingly hopeless to them and they find themselves in the depths of despair. Also, a person that continues to drink regularly into their thirties may cause permanent damage to their sex organs. This can eventually cause men to become unable to achieve an erection.

Alcoholics can also suffer from hyperglycemia (low blood sugar), become diabetic, suffer from atrophy in their limbs because of muscle loss and eventually develop cirrhosis of the liver and die at an early age. Unfortunately, this happens all too often and there is no cure for cirrhosis. Once the liver is damaged it does not ever heal, even if the person stops drinking.

Substance abuse or drug and alcohol addiction involves ingesting or administering harmful substances to our bodies. Given this, it can be expected that the continued use of these substances will have negative effects on our bodies. For alcoholism, the effects include short and long term effects, both of which can be life threatening. Some long-term physical effects include increased susceptibility to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and other life threatening diseases. On the psychological aspect, alcoholics may also develop certain mental illnesses as a result of alcoholism. However, among the two, it is the short-term effects that can affect not only the drinker but other people as well because some of these short-term effects are enough cause deadly accidents.

Some short-term effects

Some of the short-term effects of drinking can happen in as short as ten minutes after you begin drinking, and as you continue to drink, the effects you may feel may have more serous repercussions. Some of these include reduced inhibitions, wherein your behavior may change and you may end up engaging in activities that you would later regret and memory loss as a result of increased alcohol levels in your blood and which affects your brain’s control mechanisms. Other short-term effects also include the loss of muscle control, which can lead to slurred speech or falling accidents and stupor, which makes you unable to function and disoriented. In extreme cases, drinking a large amount of alcohol can cause you to go under a coma, have respiratory paralysis and die.

All these symptoms have detrimental effects on the drinker and other people. An example of which is when you decide to drive a car even if you exhibit these short term effects of alcohol consumption, which most likely cause you to have an accident that not only endangers your life but of those who are on the road as well. Given this, it is very important that people are not only aware of the long-term effects of prolonged alcohol dependence since the short-term effects are as serious and as fatal.

http://www.myhealthidea.com

More Effect Of Alcoholism Articles