Related Research Articles
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a global peer-led mutual aid fellowship begun in the U.S. and dedicated to abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism through their spiritually inclined twelve-step program. Besides stressing anonymity and offering membership to anyone wishing to stop drinking, AA's twelve traditions establish it as free to all, non-professional, non-denominational, apolitical and unaffiliated. In 2020 AA estimated its worldwide membership to be over two million with 75% of those in the U.S. and Canada.
Alcoholism is the continued drinking of alcohol despite negative results. Problematic use of alcohol has been mentioned in the earliest historical records, such as in ancient Egypt and in the Bible, and remains widespread; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated there were 283 million people with alcohol use disorders worldwide as of 2016. The term alcoholism was first coined in 1852, but alcoholism and alcoholic are stigmatizing and discourage seeking treatment, so clinical diagnostic terms such as alcohol use disorder or alcohol dependence are used instead.
Alcohol abuse encompasses a spectrum of unhealthy drinking behaviors, ranging from binge drinking and alcohol dependence to addiction resulting in physical withdrawal symptoms when abruptly stopping the intake of alcohol for more than 24 hours.
Drinking culture is the set of traditions and social behaviors that surround the consumption of alcoholic beverages as a recreational drug and social lubricant. Although alcoholic beverages and social attitudes toward drinking vary around the world, nearly every civilization has independently discovered the processes of brewing beer, fermenting wine and distilling spirits.
Alcohol dependence is a previous psychiatric diagnosis in which an individual is physically or psychologically dependent upon alcohol.
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 was passed by the United States Congress and was later signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on July 17, 1984. The act would punish any state that allowed persons under 21 years to purchase alcoholic beverages by reducing its annual federal highway apportionment by 10 percent. The law was later amended, lowering the penalty to 8 percent from fiscal year 2012 and beyond.
The Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol Problems is a Washington D.C.-based coalition of 24 public health and consumer groups co-chaired by George Hacker of the Alcohol Policies Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Stacia Murphy of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
Alcohol education is the practice of disseminating information about the effects of alcohol on health, as well as society and the family unit. It was introduced into the public schools by temperance organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in the late 19th century. Initially, alcohol education focused on how the consumption of alcoholic beverages affected society, as well as the family unit. In the 1930s, this came to also incorporate education pertaining to alcohol's effects on health. For example, even light and moderate alcohol consumption increases cancer risk in individuals. Organizations such as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the United States were founded to promulgate alcohol education alongside those of the temperance movement, such as the American Council on Alcohol Problems.
The modern disease theory of alcoholism states that problem drinking is sometimes caused by a disease of the brain, characterized by altered brain structure and function.
George F. Koob is a Professor and former Chair of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at the Scripps Research Institute and Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. In 2014 he became the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
A drug-related blackout is a phenomenon caused by the intake of any substance or medication in which short-term and long-term memory creation is impaired, therefore causing a complete inability to recall the past. Blackouts are frequently described as having effects similar to that of anterograde amnesia, in which the subject cannot recall any events after the event that caused amnesia.
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited (1995) is a book by psychiatrist George E. Vaillant that describes two multi-decade studies of the lives of 600 American males, non-alcoholics at the outset, focusing on their lifelong drinking behaviours. By following the men from youth to old age it was possible to chart their drinking patterns and what factors may have contributed to alcoholism. Another study followed 100 severe alcoholics from a clinic eight years after their detoxification. The National Review hailed the first edition (1983) as "a genuine revolution in the field of alcoholism research" and said that "Vaillant has combined clinical experience with an unprecedented amount of empirical data to produce what may ultimately come to be viewed as the single most important contribution to the literature of alcoholism since the first edition of AA's Big Book." Some of the main conclusions of Vaillant's book are:
Alcoholism in family systems refers to the conditions in families that enable alcoholism and the effects of alcoholic behavior by one or more family members on the rest of the family. Mental health professionals are increasingly considering alcoholism and addiction as diseases that flourish in and are enabled by family systems.
Binge drinking, or heavy episodic drinking, is drinking alcoholic beverages with an intention of becoming intoxicated by heavy consumption of alcohol over a short period of time, but definitions vary considerably.
Charles Saul Lieber was a Belgian-American clinical nutritionist who established that excess alcohol consumption can cause cirrhosis of the liver even in subjects who have an adequate diet, contradicting then-current scientific opinion.
Alcohol consumption in Russia remains among the highest in the world. According to a 2011 report by the World Health Organization, annual per capita consumption of alcohol in Russia was about 15.76 litres of pure alcohol, the fourth-highest volume in Europe. It dropped to 11.7 litres in 2016, dropping further to about 10.5 litres in 2019. Another general trait of Russian alcohol consumption pattern was the high volume of spirits compared with other alcoholic drinks.
Binge drinking is the practice of consuming excessive amounts of alcohol in a short period of time. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the human body, the exact amount of alcohol that would constitute binge drinking differs among individuals. The definitions of binge drinking are also nuanced across cultures and population subgroups. For example, many studies use gender-specific measures of binge drinking. The epidemiology of binge drinking likewise differs across cultures and population subgroups.
The legal drinking age varies from country to country. In the United States, the legal drinking age is currently 21. To curb excessive alcohol consumption by younger people, instead of raising the drinking age, other countries have raised the prices of alcohol beverages and encouraged the general public to drink less. Setting a legal drinking age of 21 is designed to discourage reckless alcohol consumption by youth, limiting consumption to those who are more mature, who can be expected to make reasonable and wise decisions when it comes to drinking.
Alcohol-related brain damage alters both the structure and function of the brain as a result of the direct neurotoxic effects of alcohol intoxication or acute alcohol withdrawal. Increased alcohol intake is associated with damage to brain regions including the frontal lobe, limbic system, and cerebellum, with widespread cerebral atrophy, or brain shrinkage caused by neuron degeneration. This damage can be seen on neuroimaging scans.
Many students attending colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions consume alcoholic beverages. The laws and social culture around this practice vary by country and institution type, and within an institution, some students may drink heavily whereas others may not drink at all. In the United States, drinking tends to be particularly associated with fraternities.
References
- ↑ Benton, Sarah Allen (2009). Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic – Professional Views and Personal Insights. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-35280-5.
- ↑ Brody, Jane (4 May 2009). "High Functioning, but Still Alcoholics". The New York Times . Retrieved 18 February 2012.
- ↑ "Understanding High Functioning Alcoholics". Psychology Today .
- ↑ "What is a High Functioning Alcoholic? | Definition & Signs". Alcohol.org. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
- ↑ National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (28 June 2007). "Researchers Identify Alcoholic Subtypes" (Press release). National Institutes of Health . Retrieved 18 February 2012.
- ↑ Sanderson, Megan (22 May 2012). "About 37 percent of college students could now be considered alcoholics". Daily Emerald. Retrieved 17 September 2016.
| Alcohol use |
| ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alcohol control |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Related | |||||||||||||||||
 | This health-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |