In particular, the levels of antibodies against liver-specific autoantigens are increased in patients with alcoholic liver disease and may promote alcohol-related liver damage. Finally, chronic alcohol exposure in utero interferes with normal T-cell and B-cell development, which may increase the risk of infections during both childhood and adulthood. In contrast to these deleterious effects of heavy alcohol exposure, moderate alcohol consumption may have beneficial effects on the adaptive immune system, including improved responses to vaccination and infection.
“Alcohol has diverse adverse effects throughout the body, including on all cells of the immune system, that lead to increased risk of serious infections,” said Dr. E. Jennifer Edelman, a Yale Medicine addiction medicine specialist. Because alcohol is a depressant, it can also contribute to mental health conditions, like anxiety and depression. Research indicates that heavy alcohol use can also increase the risk of suicide. Stopping alcohol use can significantly improve your health, boost your immune system and protect your body from serious infections and viruses. If you or a loved one needs help with alcohol addiction, Gateway Foundation can help. Gateway Foundation offers safe and effective treatment so you can get back to living a healthy life.
How Alcohol Impacts Your Immune System
Contact Gateway Foundation to learn more about how we can help you or your loved one pursue recovery. Women are typically more vulnerable to inflammatory and autoimmune diseases than men, and men have a higher risk of infections than women. Women are less vulnerable to infections because they have higher levels of estrogen during their pre-menopausal years, which helps the body boost the immune system and fight disease. Alcohol can hinder the body’s ability to recover from tissue injury and heal infections.
Cancer risk
Healthy habits, such as being active, eating a balanced diet, and getting enough sleep, can keep your immune system strong. But unhealthy factors, like stress, smoking, or drinking alcohol, can be taxing for your immune system and make it harder for it to fight off infection. “Those at increased risk should cut down or abstain from alcohol because every little thing an individual can do to improve the health and reduce risk is worth it at this point, even if the evidence is not entirely clear,” Mroszczyk-McDonald said. “Alcohol intake can kill normal healthy gut bacteria, which help to promote health and reduce risk of infection,” Mroszczyk-McDonald said. In the lungs, for example, alcohol damages the immune cells and fine hairs that have the important job of clearing pathogens out of our airway.
- This means that its functioning shifts to focus on breaking down the alcohol and takes its energy from other critical functions such as fighting diseases.
- Specifically, people who had consumed 30.9 ± 18.7 alcoholic drinks/day for approximately 25.6 ± 11.5 years exhibited a decreased frequency of naïve (i.e., CD45RA+) CD4 and CD8 T cells, as well as an increased frequency of memory T cells (i.e., CD45RO+) (Cook et al. 1994).
- And it’s not just that you’re more likely to get a cold — excessive drinking is linked to pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases.
- HLAs are proteins found on the surface of various cells that present antigens to the TCR on T cells to induce an immune response.
Alcohol can either activate or suppress the immune system depending on, for example, how much is consumed and how concentrated it is in the various tissues and organs. That dual action predisposes heavy drinkers both to increased infection and to chronic inflammation. These articles detail how alcohol affects the immune system and how researchers are harnessing this knowledge to help prevent and treat alcohol-related harm. Additional studies in rodents assessed the effects of alcohol on the effectiveness of bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination, which protects against tuberculosis. The studies found that when animals consumed ethanol before BCG vaccination, they were not protected against a subsequent pulmonary challenge with M.
In animal models, the consumption of ethanol only led to lower levels of white blood cells; however, the same amount of alcohol consumed as red wine resulted in no suppression of the immune response. This could is toad pee dangerous to humans be due to the action of certain compounds in red wine that could be contributing to prevent suppression of the immune system caused by alcoholReference Percival and Sims27. Similarly, wine intake, especially red wine, has been identified as having a protective effect against the common coldReference Takkouche, Regueira-Mendez, Garcia-Closas, Figueiras, Gestal-Otero and Hernan29. However, the design of this study could be questioned since the duration may have been insufficient to affect the immune system; probably it would take up to six weeks to see changes and differences in the immune system.
As described earlier for adult humans, alcohol can lead to increases in Ig levels during development, even if the numbers of mature B cells decrease. Thus, maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy (12 mg/week for most of the pregnancy) increased IgE levels in the umbilical cord blood of the infants (Bjerke et al. 1994). The white blood cells, tissues and organs that make up our body’s immune system are designed to fight off infections, disease and toxins. In low to moderate alcohol consumption, antioxidants may provide some cardiovascular benefits. Innate immune responses are nonspecific “natural killer” cells, and complement proteins.
The frequency at which a person drinks also determines how much it affects the immune system. A person who drinks every day is more likely to have a weakened immune system and experience health complications than someone who rarely drinks or only drinks on occasion. However, women who drink more than two drinks on one occasion and men who drink more than three drinks on one occasion may experience more health complications due to their excessive alcohol consumption. It’s caused by a bacterial infection that begins elsewhere in the body, such as in the gut, lungs, skin, bladder, or kidneys, and enters the bloodstream. Septicemia is a serious condition because it can cause the bloodstream to carry bacteria and toxins throughout the entire body. Without rapid hospital treatment, septicemia can lead to sepsis, which is life-threatening.
Utilizing process Raman in optimizing cultivated meat production
The effects of chronic alcohol exposure are not limited to phenotypic changes in T cells but also include T-cell functions. Among other reactions, LPS injection normally triggers lymphocyte migration out of the circulation and into tissues and the lymphatic system (Percival and Sims 2000). In water- or wine-consuming mice, LPS injection, as expected, led to a 50 percent reduction in the number of lymphocytes in the peripheral blood, indicating their mobilization into tissues. One potential explanation for the lack of detrimental effects of wine in this experiment could be the presence of phytochemicals in wine that may be able to overcome ethanol’s harmful impact on immunity.
Much progress has been made in elucidating the relationship between alcohol consumption and immune function and how this interaction affects human health. Normal immune function hinges on bidirectional communication of immune cells with nonimmune cells at the local level, as well as crosstalk between the brain and the periphery. These different layers of interaction make validation of the mechanisms by which alcohol affects immune function challenging.
Alcohol consumption can allow the hepatitis virus to persist as a chronic condition, and alcohol use disorder combined with hepatitis often accelerates liver disease progression. Gut barrier damage can make the body more vulnerable to food poisoning, and epithelial cell damage can hinder the intestines’ ability to absorb nutrients. When the gut barrier cannot function properly, harmful bacteria can leak into the bloodstream, leading to further complications.