For how we live.
A Global Burden of Disease analysis puts substance use disorder prevalence at 0.78% across the Arab League in 2023, about 63% below the global figure — yet women's opioid prevalence topped men's in 19 of 22 countries.
A new history of Norway's 1975 ban — one of the WHO's three 'best buys' against alcohol harm — traces how it survived courts, alcohol-free beer and social media, and why pressure to modernise it worries defenders.
The first GBD 2023 estimate of heart failure maps not just its size but its causes — and the causes split the world: alcohol in eastern Europe, Chagas disease in Latin America, rheumatic disease in the global south.
A controlled study tied Scotland's minimum unit price to a 13.4% fall in deaths wholly caused by alcohol, largest in the most deprived areas. The effect on hospital admissions was smaller and not significant.
There is no established safe amount, and UK and US authorities advise not drinking at all. Heavy drinking clearly causes fetal alcohol harm; the data on light drinking are genuinely sparse, not reassuring.
A systematic review of the randomised trials found no compelling evidence for any remedy. Newer work suggests the hangover is driven by inflammation and metabolites, not just dehydration.
No- and low-alcohol drinks are the fastest-growing category in the drinks trade, and one in six Americans now reaches for them. Whether they cut real drinking, or simply add to it, is barely studied.
Two popular stories — alcohol as a cause of low mood, and drinking as self-medication for it — both get less support from recent genetic and within-person data than the confident telling suggests.
The human intestinal-permeability literature lists endurance exercise, NSAIDs, pregnancy and surfactants as stressors. Coffee is not on that list, and alcohol's case is largely inferred.
The share of US adults who drink has fallen to a record 54%, and for the first time a near-majority think a daily drink or two is bad for them. What is driving the sober-curious turn is less obvious than the trend.
A meta-analysis of 27 studies found a dose-response pattern that runs against the nightcap logic: the sedative effect needs a high dose, and the REM disruption starts at a low one.
Alternating alcoholic and soft drinks is the tactic of the moment, but it has never been tested. A brief conversation with a clinician has, and it cuts drinking by about two drinks a week.
Heavy drinking tracks with weight gain fairly consistently. For light-to-moderate drinking, the evidence is genuinely mixed — and confounded by who drinks that way.
Across 107 cohort studies and 4.8 million people, the protective effect of moderate drinking disappeared once the comparison group stopped including people who had quit because they were ill.
A 2025 US Surgeon General advisory put alcohol third among preventable causes of cancer. The global data show light drinking contributes too, not only heavy use.
Two studies pin down 'holiday heart': one caught alcohol triggering discrete AF events within hours, the other found that quitting cut recurrences by nearly half over six months.
A dose-response analysis of 23 cohort studies found hypertension risk climbing steadily with intake. Stopping for a month, a separate study found, dropped systolic pressure by nearly 7%.
An inactive enzyme carried by an estimated 540 million people lets a carcinogen build up when they drink. In heavy-drinking carriers, oesophageal cancer risk runs many times higher.
Canada says two drinks a week. The US still says up to one or two a day. The gap is not a dispute about data — it is a dispute about where to draw a line on a continuous curve.
The two dominant causes of chronic liver disease are alcohol and metabolic fat. For alcohol, cirrhosis risk climbs exponentially with intake — and in women it was already raised at about one drink a day.
Imaging finds smaller brain volumes from as little as one to two daily drinks. Long-run dementia studies show a U-shape, with abstainers also at higher risk — a pattern that is easy to misread.
In the first humanitarian trial of its kind, 400 refugees and hosts were randomised. AUDIT scores fell 4.6 points more with screening and brief intervention than with usual care at six months.
In moderate-to-heavy drinkers who stopped for a month, insulin resistance fell by a quarter and two cancer-related growth factors dropped sharply — changes a matched control group did not show.
A meta-analysis of 118 trials found acamprosate and naltrexone reduce drinking, with numbers needed to treat comparable to common heart drugs. They remain widely underused.
The LiverScreen project ran transient elastography across nine countries, then sent everyone who screened positive to a hepatologist. The gap between the two numbers is the interesting part.
Clinicians rated empathy at 4.6 out of 5 and quality of information at 2.7. Every chatbot produced at least one piece of guidance judged inappropriate, overstated or inaccurate.
Brown University researchers pooled 16 studies covering more than 150,000 people. The consistent finding is not detox — it is that most participants are still drinking less months later.