Leading doctors are sounding the alarm about a growing medical menace among young people. It’s common, its devastating, and it’s totally preventable. It’s alcohol-related liver disease, and it’s killing America’s young people.
Reputation and Reality
Serious, alcohol-related liver diseases used to strike older people, but now, they’re happening among younger people.
Young people have a reputation for partying and hard drinking. Recently, that reputation has become reality. Experts think a rise in so-called binge drinking has fueled the rise in deaths from liver disease.
Death Rates From Cirrhosis Have Doubled
On a recent, eye-opening discussion on the Mayo Clinic Radio Show, doctors discussed various studies which find that deaths from alcohol-related diseases have doubled among people aged 25 to 40.
Doug Simonetto, a Mayo Clinic hepatologist or liver specialist, said it doesn’t even take that much alcohol to damage the liver. He said the big danger to young people is their tendency to binge drink.
What’s In a Binge?
Health professionals define binge drinking as having more than four drinks in two hours for women, and more than five drinks in two hours for men.
Hepatologist Joseph Galati, known as “Dr. Joe,” is also sounding the alarm. In a YouTube presentation, the popular doctor said cirrhosis rates are up 65% among young adults. Rates of liver cancer, which is linked to excessive drinking, have doubled.
We Need to Wake Up
“These are our children,” Galati says. “This is unbelievable and unacceptable. It’s alarming, and we all need to wake up to what is happening.”
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