How Does Alcohol Consumption Impact Your Liver?
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Kyle Riding
In this program:
Alcohol consumption can impact the liver. Watch as medical laboratory scientist Dr. Kyle Riding explains how the liver can be impacted by moderate and excessive alcohol consumption – and an enzyme that can indicate alcohol overconsumption.
Transcript
Leo Hesse:
Is it true that the liver does significantly more work for people who consume a significant amount of alcohol during the week or month and...what would you say will be the difference in a liver test for someone who drinks an excessive amount of alcohol versus someone who does not drink any alcohol at all?
Dr. Kyle Riding:
That's a great question, and it is going to be person-independent, and I will say the impact of alcohol on the liver, a toxicologist or a dietician may actually be able to give a much more in-depth discussion than I can. But from a biochemical standpoint, when you consume alcohol, it's going to be broken down into very toxic intermediaries. And if you ever consumed a drink before, we all know that that headache you can get the next morning, that hangover. And that hangover is partly due to those toxic intermediaries getting to your central nervous system, getting to your brain, and causing the fatigue and the headache and the joint aches that we've all possibly experienced. If we've had some drinks so the liver, its job is to detoxify those compounds that alcohol kind of breaks into. Here's the problem, the liver is a little factory, and it can only do so much, it can only process so much at one time. So if you overimbibe and you overdrink alcoholic beverages, and that can mean either binge drinking or having too much to drink over a long period of time, your liver can't keep up with that workload. And your liver starts directing a lot of its machinery, a lot of its cellular and chemical machinery to constantly detoxify those compounds that the alcohol brings.
Now, because of that, the liver ignores some of its other functions, particularly fat metabolism, so what can start to happen is alterations in fat levels within the liver itself. And you can start to get these fatty streaks and these cells filled with fat inside of the liver, which basically serves as packing peanuts in those liver cells, so they can't do anything, because they're filled with packing peanuts. The other thing that happens is that those toxic compounds also directly damage the liver cells, and what we can get is there's this enzyme called gamma-glutamyltransferase, GGT, all right? GGT is a very sensitive indicator of alcohol-induced liver damage. In fact, it is one of the most sensitive enzymes produced by your liver that can detect alcohol-derived damage to your liver. So to get to your question, for individuals that have been over-consuming alcohol, either on a chronic basis, or maybe an individual who every weekend goes out and binge drinks on one night, but then...plays it cool other evenings, we'll see a rise in the GGT mainly before we see a rise in any of the other liver enzymes we've spoken about. So that GGT is truly a sensitive indicator, and we'll notice it first and foremost in those folks who are overindulging in alcohol, and we won't see that in folks that are not.
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