Answer Addiction

Tag: smoking and drinking

  • Study: Drinking A Bottle Of Wine A Week As Bad As Smoking 5 to 10 Cigarettes

    Study: Drinking A Bottle Of Wine A Week As Bad As Smoking 5 to 10 Cigarettes

    A new study is the first to investigate the “cigarette equivalent” of alcohol’s cancer risk.

    A new study from the United Kingdom compares drinking a bottle of wine in seven days to smoking five to ten cigarettes.

    BMC Public Health published the study, the first to attempt to find the “cigarette equivalent” of alcohol’s risk of causing cancer. Women and men in the study had different results—for women, a bottle of wine a week equals the cancer risk of five cigarettes, and for men, it is ten cigarettes.

    “Everybody knows that cigarettes cause cancer,” Dr. Richard Saitz, an addiction medicine specialist and chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told Live Science. “Hearing that some amount of alcohol is the equivalent of some amount of cigarettes” in cancer risk is a good way to spread awareness, Saitz said.

    Saitz noted that the cancer risk of alcohol has been “under the radar,” and the researchers in the study agree. Multiple studies connecting moderate drinking to health risks have been published in the last few years.

    It had been widely believed that moderate drinking reduced a gambit of health risks, but new research has tied moderate drinking to higher blood pressure, stroke risk, and now possibly increased lifetime cancer risk.

    According to Live Science, lead study author Dr. Theresa Hydes, of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, said, “Our estimation of a cigarette equivalent for alcohol provides a useful measure for communicating possible cancer risks that exploits successful historical messaging on smoking. We hope that by using cigarettes as the comparator we could communicate this message more effectively to help individuals make more informed lifestyle choices.”

    One bottle of wine (the alcohol used in the study) contains near 80 grams (2.8 ounces) of pure alcohol. Using national data from the UK, the study looked at lifetime risk of cancer in the general population, including published research on the relationship between smoking, alcohol, and cancer.

    Non-smoking men who drank one bottle of wine a week were estimated to have a 1.0% increase in lifetime cancer risk. Non-smoking women who drank the same were estimated to have a 1.4% increase in lifetime cancer risk.

    The research presumes that women are at higher risk due to the connection between alcohol consumption and increased breast cancer rates.         

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Smoking, Alcohol Use Linked To Different Brain Areas

    Smoking, Alcohol Use Linked To Different Brain Areas

    A new study suggests that individuals who smoke may do so in order to increase their brain connectivity with nicotine.

    Connectivity in certain areas of the brain may affect smokers’ and drinkers’ tendencies to continue the behavior, new research has found. 

    The study, done by researchers in the department of computer science at the University of Warwick, looked at the neural mechanisms connected to two types of substance use: drinking alcohol and smoking. 

    Researchers studied 2,000 study participants, according to Science Daily. In doing so, they discovered that those who smoked had low connectivity, particularly in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which is a brain region that is connected with impulsivity.

    This suggests, according to researchers, that individuals who smoke may do so in order to increase their brain connectivity with nicotine, which has a stimulating effect. It also suggests that being impulsive may play a role in beginning and continuing to smoke. 

    In drinkers, researchers noted that there was high overall connectivity in the brain, particularly in the brain region associated with reward, which is the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The stimulation in this reward center, according to researchers, may be what leads some individuals to drink. 

    “Importantly the extent of these functional connectivity changes in the brains of drinkers and smokers correlated with the amount of alcohol and nicotine being consumed,” Science Daily stated. “Critically they were even detectable in individuals smoking only a few cigarettes or drinking one unit of alcohol every day.”

    Researchers also noted that it may be possible to study an individual’s connectivity at age 14 to predict whether they would smoke or drink at age 19. 

    “These discoveries help to show that there are different neural bases of different types of addiction, and that the orbitofrontal cortex, a key brain region in emotion, is implicated in these two types of addiction,” said Professor Edmund Rolls from the University of Warwick. 

    According to Professor Jianfeng Feng, also from the University of Warwick, the findings of this study could be vital when it comes to public health implications. Feng cited a World Health Organization study which states there are 1.1 billion people in the world who smoke and 2.3 billion who drink. He also noted that more than 3 million people die annually due to alcohol use disorder.

    “These are key discoveries that advance our understanding of the neurological bases of smoking and drinking and also provide new evidence on the different neurological mechanisms that are related to these two types of human addictive behavior, smoking and drinking, and these advances have implications for prevention and treatment of these two substance use,” Feng noted. 

    View the original article at thefix.com