People’s finger lengths may hold a vital clue to their drinking habits, a new study suggests. There is evidence that alcohol consumption is influenced by prenatal sex steroids – so experts from Swansea University and colleagues from the Medical University of Lodz decided to use a sample of students for their research into the subject.
Their findings, published in the American Journal of Human Biology, revealed relationships between high alcohol consumption and long 4th digits (ring fingers) relative to 2nd digits (index fingers). This showed that high prenatal testosterone relative to oestrogen is linked to high student alcohol consumption.
Professor John Manning said: “Alcohol consumption is a major social and economic problem. Therefore, it is important to understand why alcohol use shows considerable differences across individuals.”
The study used a sample of 258 participants – 169 of them female – and it revealed consumption rates varied between the sexes. In comparison to women, men show higher alcohol consumption and higher mortality from alcohol abuse.
He said:“A pattern like this suggests an involvement of sex hormones, such as testosterone and oestrogen. Digit ratio (2D:4D: the relative lengths of the 2nd and 4th fingers) is thought to be an index of early testosterone (long 4th digit) and oestrogen (long 2nd digit).
“It is known that alcohol-dependent patients have very long 4th digits relative to their 2nd digits, suggesting high testosterone relative to oestrogen exposure before birth. As expected, the associations were stronger for men than women.”
Now the researchers hope their conclusions will bring a better understanding of the factors underlying the pattern of alcohol consumption, from abstinence to occasional use to harmful dependence.
Medicine is subjecting the negative effects of alcohol on body and health to ever greater scrutiny – not surprisingly us, as alcohol is one of the strongest cell toxins that exist. In a recent study, doctors at took mobile ECG monitors along to parties of young people who had one principal aim: to drink and be merry. Yet the science produced by the MunichBREW II study made for sobering reading. It revealed that binge drinking can have a concerning effect on the hearts even of healthy young people in surprisingly many cases, including the development of clinically relevant arrhythmias. The results of the study have just been published in the European Heart Journal.
The team from the Department of Cardiologyat LMU University Hospital launched the MunichBREW I study at Munich Oktoberfest in 2015. Back then, the doctors, led by Professor Stefan Brunnerand PD Dr Moritz Sinner, studied the connection between excessive alcohol consumption and cardiac arrhythmias – but only through an electrocardiogram (ECG) snapshot.
Now the scientists wanted to gain a more detailed picture, so they set out with their mobile equipment once again. Their destinations were various small parties attended by young adults with a high likelihood “that many of the partygoers would reach breath alcohol concentrations (BAC) of at least 1.2 grams per kilogram,” says Stefan Brunner. These were the participants of the MunichBREW II study – the world’s largest investigation to date of acute alcohol consumption and ECG changes in prolonged ECGs spanning several days.
Hearts out of sync – especially in recovery phase
Overall, the researchers evaluated the data of over 200 partygoers who, with peak blood alcohol values of up to 2.5 grams per kilogram, had imbibed quite a few drinks. The ECG devices monitored their cardiac rhythms for a total of 48 hours, with the researchers distinguishing between the baseline (hour 0), the drinking period (hours 1-5), the recovery period (hours 6-19), and two control periods corresponding to 24 hours after the drinking and recovery periods, respectively. Acute alcohol intake was monitored by BAC measurements during the drinking period. ECGs were analysed for heart rate, heart rate variability, atrial fibrillation, and other types of cardiac arrhythmia. Despite the festive mood of the study participants, the quality of the ECGs was almost universally high throughout.
“Clinically relevant arrhythmias were detected in over five percent of otherwise healthy participants,” explains Moritz Sinner, “and primarily in the recovery phase.” Alcohol intake during the drinking period led to an increasingly rapid pulse of over 100 beats per minute. Alcohol, it would seem, can profoundly affect the autonomous regulatory processes of the heart. “Our study furnishes, from a cardiological perspective, another negative effect of acute excessive alcohol consumption on health,” stresses Brunner. Meanwhile, the long-term harmful effects of alcohol-related cardiac arrhythmias on cardiac health remains a subject for further research.
“Unhealthy commodities” such as tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, social media, and fossil fuels, as well as impacts of fossil fuel consumption such as climate change and air pollution are associated with depression, suicide, and self-harm, according to a study published August 28 by Kate Dun-Campbell from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and colleagues.
Globally, around one out of every eight people currently live with a mental health disorder. These disorders – including depression, suicide, anxiety, and other diseases and disorders – can have many underlying causes. Some of those causes could be related to commercial determinants of health – the ways in which commercial activities and commodities impact health and equity. Commercial determinants of health can be specifically unhealthy, such as alcohol or tobacco consumption, unhealthy food, and the use of fossil fuels. To further understand how these unhealthy commodities might impact mental health, the authors of this study performed an umbrella synthesis of 65 review studies examining connections between six specific commodities – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, gambling, social media, and fossil fuels. The author also included studies looking at mental health impacts of fossil fuel use such as climate change and air pollution.
The umbrella review found evidence for links between depression and alcohol, tobacco, gambling, social media, ultra-processed foods and air pollution. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling, social media, climate change and air pollution were associated with suicide, and social media was also associated with self-harm. Climate change and air pollution were also linked to anxiety. The review brought together many different methodologies and measurements, and could not establish the underlying cause of the negative mental health outcomes. But the results indicate that unhealthy commodities should be considered when researchers attempt to understand and improve mental ill health.
The authors add: “Our review highlights that there is already compelling evidence of the negative impact of unhealthy products on mental health, despite key gaps in understanding the impact of broader commercial practices.”
When pubs, bars and restaurants in England removed their largest size of wine sold by the glass, consumers drank less alcohol
Photo from Pixabay CC0
Alcohol consumption is the fifth largest contributor to premature death and disease globally. Many cues in physical and economic environments influence alcohol consumption across populations. One proposed intervention to excessive alcohol consumption is reducing the size of servings of alcoholic drinks sold by the glass, but there has been no real-world evidence for the effectiveness of this.
In the new study, researchers asked 21 licensed premises in England to remove from their menus their largest serving of wine by the glass – usually 250mL – for four weeks. The researchers then tracked the total volume of wine, beer and cider sold by each establishment.
Over the course of the four weeks, the total volume of wine sold by the licensed premises decreased by 7.6%, and there was no overall increase in beer and cider sales. There was an increase in the sales of smaller servings of wine by the glass – generally 125mL and 175mL – but no impact on sales of wine by the bottle or beer or cider sales.
“This suggests that this is a promising intervention for decreasing alcohol consumption across populations, which merits consideration as part of alcohol licensing regulations,” the authors say.
Marteau adds, “Removing the largest serving size of wine by the glass in 21 licensed premises reduced the volume of wine sold, in keeping with the wealth of research showing smaller serving sizes reduce how much we eat. This could become a novel intervention to improve population health by reducing how much we drink.”
In social media posts on the community network Reddit, users reported reduced cravings for alcohol when taking drugs intended to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity. Across a number of threads – with titles such as “Did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug?” and “I don’t know if this is a side effect but … Mounjaro makes me drink less!!!!!” – users reported a changing relationship with beer, wine, and liquor.
An analysis of those posts, together with a remote study of individuals with obesity who reported using semaglutide and tirzepatide, found that the drugs decreased cravings and reduced alcohol consumption, according to a study by Virginia Tech researchers published inScientific Reports.
“These findings add to a growing literature that these medications may curb dangerous drinking habits,” said Warren Bickel, Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and corresponding author.
Combing Reddit for users’ experiences
Scientists with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute’s Addiction Recovery Research Center combined two different studies to build on existing research, including studies that showed the drugs were effective in reducing alcohol consumption in animal models.
The first was an analysis of more than 68 000 Reddit posts from 2009-23 that included terms linked to GLP-1 approved medications.
Semaglutide is a GLP-1 agonist, a class of drugs that reduce blood sugar and energy intake by mimicking the actions of hormones released after eating.
Among the keywords included in the search were Mounjaro, Wegovy, Ozempic, and Trulicity.
After cleaning the resulting data – such as eliminating comments with fewer than 100 characters – the set was narrowed to 33 609 posts from 14 595 unique users.
The study was unique in using Reddit to analyse the reported experience of thousands of users.
On examining alcohol-related discussions, researchers found that 962 individuals made 1580 alcohol-related posts.
Of those, 71.7% addressed reduced cravings, reduced usage, and other negative effects due to drinking.
In a second study, 153 participants who self-reported having obesity were recruited from various social media platforms.
Roughly a third of these participants represented the control group, a third were taking either a semaglutide injection or tablet, and a third were using tirzepatide.
Participants on semaglutide or tirzepatide reported drinking significantly fewer drinks, on average, than those in the control group who were not on any medication for diabetes or weight loss.
In addition, researchers found that both the average number of drinks and the odds of binge drinking were found to be significantly lower.
Results also found that the stimulative and sedative effects of alcohol intoxication are reduced when taking these medications.
“Participants reported drinking less, experienced fewer effects of alcohol when they did drink it, and decreased odds of binge drinking,” said Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, assistant professor at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and one of the study’s co-authors.
Researchers believe theirs is the first published report following tirezepatide, sold under the brand name Mounjaro, which was approved in 2022 and is used for treatment of Type 2 diabetes and weight loss.
Why this matters
Case studies and reports in the popular press hint at the drugs’ unexpected side effect of reducing addictive behaviors, including the desire to consume alcohol.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved only three medications to treat alcohol use disorder: disulfiram, naltrexone, and acamprosate.
They have shown only modest success, have poor compliance, and are underprescribed.
The authors suggest further randomized controlled trials to explore the therapeutic potential of GLP-1 agonists and GIP/GLP-1 combination drugs to treat alcohol use disorder, which affects 5.9% of individuals in the United States ages 12 and older.
In addition, the participants identified as mostly white and female, and further studies in more diverse populations are needed to examine sex and race differences.
“Although evidence supporting the use of these medications for alcohol use disorder is growing, the field still needs to learn considerably more about them, particularly in identifying the underlying mechanisms. We plan to contribute to that effort,” Bickel said.
The drugs are a promising development in the study of alcohol use disorder. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicate 15.7 million people in the United States meet the criteria for the chronic, relapsing brain disorder that is a significant contributor to global mortality yet remains one of the most undertreated conditions, Bickel said.
Although past research has indicated that moderate alcohol consumption can reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, more recent studies suggest that moderate levels of drinking may be hazardous to heart health. A new analysis now sheds new insight on this complex relationship between alcohol consumption and the progression of CVD, showing that a few particular alcohol metabolites strongly influence its protective effects.
Published in the journal BMC Medicine, the study observed a total of 60 alcohol consumption-related metabolites, identifying seven circulating metabolites that link long-term moderate alcohol consumption with an increased risk of CVD, and three circulating metabolites that link this same drinking pattern with a lower risk of CVD.
The findings from the study led by Boston University School of Public Health and Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University (Friedman School) detail the molecular pathway of long-term alcohol consumption and show that further research on these metabolites is needed for targeted prevention and treatment of alcohol-related CVD.
“The study findings demonstrate that alcohol consumption may trigger changes of our metabolomic profiles, potentially yielding both beneficial and harmful outcomes,” says Dr Chunyu Liu, assistant professor of biostatistics at BUSPH and co-corresponding/co-senior author of the study along with Dr.Jiantao Ma, assistant professor in the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science at the Friedman School.
“However, rather than definitively settling that debate, this study underscores the intricate effects of alcohol consumption on cardiovascular health and generates a useful hypothesis for future investigations,” Dr Liu says.
The researchers analysed blood samples to measure the association between the cumulative average consumption of beer, wine, and liquor and 211 metabolites among Framingham Heart Study Offspring Study participants, who are the children of participants in the long-running Boston University-based Framingham Heart Study, over 20 years.
Of the 2428 participants, 636 developed CVD over the study period. Among the 60 drinking-related metabolites, 13 metabolites had a stronger association with alcohol consumption in women than in men, perhaps due to higher blood alcohol levels from women’s generally smaller body size versus the same amount of alcohol.
Consuming different types of alcohol was also linked to different metabolomic responses, with beer consumption generating a slightly weaker association overall than wine and liquor.
In roughly two-thirds of the 60 metabolites, higher plasma levels were detected in participants who consumed greater amounts of alcohol. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), were among the metabolites not associated with alcohol consumption.
The researchers then calculated two alcohol consumption-associated metabolite scores, which had opposite associations with the development of CVD.
“While our study presents intriguing findings, validation through state-of-the-art methods and large and diverse study populations is crucial,” Dr Ma says.
“To enhance reliability, we aim to conduct larger-scale research involving a more diverse racial and ethnic background, as the current study participants are all white. In addition, we will expand our study to integrate with other molecular markers such as genetic information to illustrate the complex relationships between alcohol consumption, metabolite features, and cardiovascular risk.”
For some people, drinking red wine even in small amounts causes a headache, which typically occurs within 30 minutes to three hours after drinking as little as a small glass of wine. Researchers have examined why this happens – even to people who don’t get headaches when drinking small amounts of other alcoholic beverages. In their work, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers posit that a flavanol found naturally in red wines can interfere with the proper metabolism of alcohol and can lead to a headache.
The headache culprit: Quercetin, a flavanol
This flavanol is called quercetin and it is naturally present in all kinds of fruits and vegetables, including grapes. It’s considered a healthy antioxidant and is even available in supplement form. But when metabolized with alcohol, it can be problematic.
“When it gets in your bloodstream, your body converts it to a different form called quercetin glucuronide,” said wine chemist and corresponding author Andrew Waterhouse, professor emeritus with the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology. “In that form, it blocks the metabolism of alcohol.”
Acetaldehyde toxin buildup leads to flushing, headache, nausea
As a result, people can end up accumulating the toxin acetaldehyde, explains lead author Apramita Devi, postdoctoral researcher with the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology.
“Acetaldehyde is a well-known toxin, irritant and inflammatory substance,” said Devi. “Researchers know that high levels of acetaldehyde can cause facial flushing, headache and nausea.”
The medication disulfiram prescribed to alcoholics to prevent them from drinking causes these same symptoms. Waterhouse said that’s because the drug also causes the toxin to build up in the body when normally an enzyme in the body would break it down. About 40% of the East Asian population also has an enzyme that doesn’t work very well, allowing acetaldehyde to build up in their system.
“We postulate that when susceptible people consume wine with even modest amounts of quercetin, they develop headaches, particularly if they have a preexisting migraine or another primary headache condition,” said co-author Morris Levin, professor of neurology and director of the Headache Center at the University of California, San Francisco. “We think we are finally on the right track toward explaining this millennia-old mystery. The next step is to test it scientifically on people who develop these headaches, so stay tuned.”
Sunlight increases headache-causing flavanol in grapes
Waterhouse said levels of this flavanol can vary dramatically in red wine.
“Quercetin is produced by the grapes in response to sunlight,” Waterhouse said. “If you grow grapes with the clusters exposed, such as they do in the Napa Valley for their cabernets, you get much higher levels of quercetin. In some cases, it can be four to five times higher.”
Levels of quercetin can also differ depending on how the wine is made, including skin contact during fermentation, fining processes and aging.
Clinical trial on wine headaches
Scientists will next compare red wines that contain a lot of quercetin with those that have very little to test their theory about red wine headaches on people. This small human clinical trial, funded by the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, will be led by UCSF.
Researchers said there are still many unknowns about the causes of red wine headaches. It’s unclear why some people seem more susceptible to them than others. Researchers don’t know if the enzymes of people who suffer from red wine headaches are more easily inhibited by quercetin or if this population is just more easily affected by the buildup of the toxin acetaldehyde.
“If our hypothesis pans out, then we will have the tools to start addressing these important questions,” Waterhouse said.
Fathers who have been on parental leave have a significantly reduced risk of being hospitalised due to alcohol consumption. This is shown by a study published in Addiction from researchers at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University.
The aim of the study was to assess whether fathers’ parental leave influences alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. In order to try to find out if that is the case, the researchers have investigated the effects of parental leave policy that was implemented in Sweden in 1995. The policy encouraged fathers to use parental leave by reserving 30 days of leave for their use alone and resulted in the proportion of fathers using parental leave increasing from 43% to 75%.
“Our findings were pretty remarkable considering the severity of the studied outcome. Although alcohol-related hospitalizations were rather uncommon, we found that after the policy was implemented there was a 34% decrease in these hospitalizations among fathers in the two years after birth, as well as smaller decreases up to 8 and 18 years after birth,” says Helena Honkaniemi, researcher at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University.
“Most changes were found among hospitalisations for alcohol intoxication and alcohol-related mental and behavioural disorders. Additional analyses evaluating actual changes in parental leave use from before to after the policy suggest that these health consequences could be explained by the increase in fathers’ parental leave use, rather than other underlying trends,” says Helena Honkaniemi.
However, no changes were found for alcohol-related mortality.
Co-author Associate Professor Sol Juárez believes that the results of the study could be useful for policymakers.
“Policymakers should consider that fathers’ parental leave not only promotes more gender-equal participation in childcare, but can also reduce alcohol-related harms,” Juárez says.
The study “Alcohol-related morbidity and mortality by fathers’ parental leave: A quasi-experimental study in Sweden” draws on Swedish register data of all fathers of singleton children born from January 1992 to December 1997, three years before and after the policy was implemented.
Children of a parent with alcohol or drug use disorder have a greater risk of intellectual disability, even if the problem only lies with the father, researchers from Karolinska Institutet report. According to the study, which is published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, preventive measures should be directed at both parents.
A woman’s consumption of alcohol during pregnancy has been well established as increasing the risk of the child developing. Research from Karolinska Institutet now shows that all forms of substance abuse, both in the mother and the father, and not only during pregnancy, can constitute a risk factor.
Previous efforts aimed at mothers
“Preventative measures, such as educating healthcare professionals and public health recommendations, have focused for decades on mothers with alcohol-related problems,” says Lotfi Khemiri, researcher at Karolinska Institutet. “Our findings highlight the importance of also directing such measures towards fathers with different types of substance use disorder.”
The study drew on data from Swedish registries with almost two million babies born between 1978 and 2002 and their parents. The researchers found that 1.2% of babies born to parents without such a disorder were diagnosed with an intellectual disability, compared with 3% of the babies who had one parent with a diagnosis related to a substance use disorder (alcohol or drug abuse).
Higher risk before birth
The elevated risk was greater if the parent had received a diagnosis before or during pregnancy rather than after birth. A substance use disorder diagnosis registered before birth was associated with more than twice the risk of intellectual disability in the baby, regardless of which parent had the diagnosis. The correlation was weaker but still statistically significant after adjustment of socioeconomic factors and psychiatric comorbidity in the parents.
“Since it was an observational study, we can draw no conclusions about the underlying mechanism, but we suspect that both genetic and environmental factors, including harmful effects of substance abuse on foetal development, may play a part,” says Dr Khemiri. “We hope that the results will contribute to the preventative efforts, as well as to the improved diagnosis of children with an intellectual disability and to timely intervention directed both to the child as well as parents in need of substance use disorder treatment.”
Alcohol a major risk factor
Intellectual disability was observed to be much more likely in alcohol-related problems during pregnancy, where the risk was five and three times higher depending on whether it was the mother or father who had the alcohol use disorder diagnosis.
An analysis of seven international research studies found that, even in adults without hypertension, blood pressure (BP) readings may climb more steeply over the years as the number of daily alcoholic drinks rise. The findings, published in the journal Hypertension, also found no beneficial effects to a low level of alcohol intake.
Pooling seven international research studies, this analysis confirms for the first time a continuous increase in blood pressure measures in both participants with low and high alcohol intake. Even low levels of alcohol consumption were associated with detectable increases in blood pressure levels that may lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular events.
“We found no beneficial effects in adults who drank a low level of alcohol compared to those who did not drink alcohol,” said senior study author Marco Vinceti, MD, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia University and an adjunct professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “We were somewhat surprised to see that consuming an already-low level of alcohol was also linked to higher blood pressure changes over time compared to no consumption – although far less than the blood pressure increase seen in heavy drinkers.”
“Our analysis was based on grams of alcohol consumed and not just on the number of drinks to avoid the bias that might arise from the different amount of alcohol contained in ‘standard drinks’ across countries and/or types of beverages,” said study co-author Tommaso Filippini, MD, PhD, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health in the Medical School of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, and affiliate researcher at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.
Researchers reviewed the health data for all participants across the seven studies for more than five years. They compared adults who drank alcohol regularly with non-drinkers and found:
Systolic BP rose 1.25mmHg in people who consumed an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 4.9mmHg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day.
Diastolic BP rose 1.14mmHg in people consuming an average of 12 grams of alcohol per day, rising to 3.1mmHg in people consuming an average of 48 grams of alcohol per day. These associations were seen in males but not in females. Diastolic blood pressure measures the force against artery walls between heartbeats and is not as strong a predictor of heart disease risk in comparison to systolic.
“Alcohol is certainly not the sole driver of increases in blood pressure; however, our findings confirm it contributes in a meaningful way. Limiting alcohol intake is advised, and avoiding it is even better,” Vinceti said.
Although none of the participants had high blood pressure when they enrolled in the studies, their blood pressure measurements at the beginning did have an impact on the alcohol findings.
”We found participants with higher starting blood pressure readings, had a stronger link between alcohol intake and blood pressure changes over time. This suggests that people with a trend towards increased (although still not ‘high’) blood pressure may benefit the most from low to no alcohol consumption,” said study co-author Paul K. Whelton, MD, MSc, at Tulane University’s School of Public Health.
Study details and background:
Researchers analysed data from seven, large, observational studies involving 19 548 adults (65% men), ranging in age from 20 to their early 70s at the start of the studies.
The studies were conducted in the United States, Korea and Japan, and published between 1997 and 2021. None of the participants had previously been diagnosed with high blood pressure or other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, liver disease, alcoholism or binge drinking.
Usual alcoholic beverage intake was recorded at the beginning of each study and the researchers translated this information into a usual number of grams of alcohol consumed daily. The researchers used a new statistical technique that allowed them to combine results from several studies and plot a curve showing the impact of any amount of alcohol typically consumed on changes in blood pressure over time.
Other co-authors and authors’ disclosures are listed in the manuscript.
