The liver is not the only organ affected by one too many sips of wine

Jul 1, 2014 09:50 GMT  ·  By

This might come as a bit of a shock to some people but, as it turns out, those who consume one too many sips of wine or some other alcoholic beverage on a regular basis have high chances to have more than their liver affected by this habit.

Thus, specialist Ross Summer with the Thomas Jefferson University in the United States and fellow researchers argue that, according to evidence at hand, heavy drinking also damages an individual's lungs.

More precisely, these researchers claim that folks who drink a tad too much and too often are more likely to be diagnosed with various lung diseases at some point in their lives, Newswise tells us.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome, a condition which can prove deadly and for which a cure is yet to be discovered, and pneumonia are just two of the health problems heavy drinkers are likely to experience, the same source explains.

Researcher Ross Summer and his colleagues believe that heavy drinking can cause irreparable damage to a person's lungs by making fat build up in these organs and triggering immune system failure.

Experiments carried out on laboratory rats have shown that, when these animals are exposed to significant amounts of alcohol for several days in a row, so-called surfactant cells in their lungs start producing more fat than they normally would.

When not produced in excess, this fatty secretion helps keep the airways properly lubricated. However, too much of it damages the lungs. What's more, the excess fatty secretion caused by alcohol exposure can end up affecting immune cells dubbed macrophages.

“It’s likely that the macrophages try to engulf the excess fat in order to protect the cells in the lung, but in doing so, they become less effective sentinels against infection and disease,” researcher Ross Summer said in a statement.

“We call it the alcoholic fatty lung. The fat accumulation in the lungs mimics the process that causes fat to build up and destroy the liver of alcoholics,” the Thomas Jefferson University specialist went on to comment on his and his colleagues findings.

This is yet to be confirmed, but the specialists suspect that the same mechanisms are to blame for the fact that heavy drinkers are more vulnerable to one lung disease or another. The researcher wish to continue their work and put their theory to the test.

Should their findings also hold true in the case of humans, the scientists argue that, all things considered, it might be possible to use lipid-lowering drugs to treat alcohol-induced pneumonia, maybe even put a leash on the progress of acute respiratory distress syndrome.