Alcohol consumption in the general population is associated with structural changes in multiple organ systems
- University of Ioannina, Greece
- Imperial College London, United Kingdom
- Brunel University London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Background: Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with damage to various organs, but its multi-organ effects have not been characterised across the usual range of alcohol drinking in a large general population sample.
Methods: We assessed global effect sizes of alcohol consumption on quantitative magnetic resonance imaging phenotypic measures of the brain, heart, aorta and liver of UK-Biobank participants who reported drinking alcohol.
Results: We found a monotonic association of higher alcohol consumption with lower normalised brain volume across the range of alcohol intakes (–1.7´10-3±0.76´10-3 per doubling of alcohol consumption, P=3.0´10-14). Alcohol consumption also was associated directly with measures of left ventricular mass index and left ventricular and atrial volume indices. Liver fat increased by a mean of 0.15% per doubling of alcohol consumption.
Conclusions: Our results imply that there is not a 'safe threshold' below which there are no toxic effects of alcohol. Current public health guidelines concerning alcohol consumption may need to be revisited.
Funding: See acknowledgements
Data availability
For this project, UK Biobank has granted access to our team through approved applications with ID #13375 and #18545. Individual-level data cannot be shared with researchers who are not registered as collaborators (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/enable-your-research/manage-your-project). Guidance on how to apply for the various types of UK Biobank can be found in the following link https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/enable-your-research/apply-for-access.
Article and author information
Author details
Evangelos Evangelou
Paul M Matthews MD, PhD
Funding
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Edward D Janus, University of Melbourne, Australia
Ethics
Human subjects: In UK Biobank, ethical approval for data collection was received from the North-West Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee (REC reference: 11/NW/0382) and the research was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association. No additional ethical approval was required for the analyses of the data.
Version history
- Received: December 1, 2020
- Accepted: June 1, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 1, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 10, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Evangelou et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Alcohol consumption in the general population is associated with structural changes in multiple organ systems
eLife 10:e65325.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65325
Further reading
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- Epidemiology and Global Health
Background:
The Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania has become a low-transmission area for Plasmodium falciparum. Despite being considered an area of pre-elimination for years, achieving elimination has been difficult, likely due to a combination of imported infections from mainland Tanzania and continued local transmission.
Methods:
To shed light on these sources of transmission, we applied highly multiplexed genotyping utilizing molecular inversion probes to characterize the genetic relatedness of 282 P. falciparum isolates collected across Zanzibar and in Bagamoyo district on the coastal mainland from 2016 to 2018.
Results:
Overall, parasite populations on the coastal mainland and Zanzibar archipelago remain highly related. However, parasite isolates from Zanzibar exhibit population microstructure due to the rapid decay of parasite relatedness over very short distances. This, along with highly related pairs within shehias, suggests ongoing low-level local transmission. We also identified highly related parasites across shehias that reflect human mobility on the main island of Unguja and identified a cluster of highly related parasites, suggestive of an outbreak, in the Micheweni district on Pemba island. Parasites in asymptomatic infections demonstrated higher complexity of infection than those in symptomatic infections, but have similar core genomes.
Conclusions:
Our data support importation as a main source of genetic diversity and contribution to the parasite population in Zanzibar, but they also show local outbreak clusters where targeted interventions are essential to block local transmission. These results highlight the need for preventive measures against imported malaria and enhanced control measures in areas that remain receptive to malaria reemergence due to susceptible hosts and competent vectors.
Funding:
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, grants R01AI121558, R01AI137395, R01AI155730, F30AI143172, and K24AI134990. Funding was also contributed from the Swedish Research Council, Erling-Persson Family Foundation, and the Yang Fund. RV acknowledges funding from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (reference MR/R015600/1), jointly funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), under the MRC/FCDO Concordat agreement and is also part of the EDCTP2 program supported by the European Union. RV also acknowledges funding by Community Jameel.
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- Computational and Systems Biology
- Epidemiology and Global Health
The chemical composition of foods is complex, variable, and dependent on many factors. This has a major impact on nutrition research as it foundationally affects our ability to adequately assess the actual intake of nutrients and other compounds. In spite of this, accurate data on nutrient intake are key for investigating the associations and causal relationships between intake, health, and disease risk at the service of developing evidence-based dietary guidance that enables improvements in population health. Here, we exemplify the importance of this challenge by investigating the impact of food content variability on nutrition research using three bioactives as model: flavan-3-ols, (–)-epicatechin, and nitrate. Our results show that common approaches aimed at addressing the high compositional variability of even the same foods impede the accurate assessment of nutrient intake generally. This suggests that the results of many nutrition studies using food composition data are potentially unreliable and carry greater limitations than commonly appreciated, consequently resulting in dietary recommendations with significant limitations and unreliable impact on public health. Thus, current challenges related to nutrient intake assessments need to be addressed and mitigated by the development of improved dietary assessment methods involving the use of nutritional biomarkers.
