You’ve gotta have hope. Without hope life is meaningless. Without hope life is meaning less and less. ~Author Unknown
A recent study of alcoholism studies in the British medical journal Lancet suggests that men have more than a 20 percent lifetime risk of developing alcohol-use disorders, while the risk for women is between 8 and 10 percent. Much of that risk is inherited. Studies show that as much as 60 percent of the risk of alcohol-use disorders is genetic, said Dr. Marc Schuckit, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, and director of the alcohol and treatment program at the Veterans Affairs – San Diego Healthcare System. Dr. Schuckit was the author of the Lancet study.
The risk for alcoholism is four times greater for children of alcoholics. This statistic includes children adopted by non-alcoholic families, Dr. Schuckit said. But people who have a genetically influenced disorder can control that risk by behaving responsibly. Just as someone at risk for diabetes should not make the problem worse by becoming overweight, someone with a family history of alcoholism must avoid drinking in excess.
Why is the risk of alcoholism greater in men than in women? Psychiatrists point out that young women also have twice the rate of depression and anxiety that men do and daughters of alcoholic fathers tend more toward depression than alcoholism, according to Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
“There may be a similar underlying neurobiology to a lot of psychiatric conditions, and how they manifest in particular has something to do with circumstances, has something to do with gender, and has something to do with age.”
According to Raison, women tend toward alcoholism in their 40s and 50s – which may be their way of counteracting anxiety – around that time that men tend to develop depression.
Another factor is that male livers can metabolize about twice as much alcohol as females’ livers. This means that men can drink about twice as much as women before it becomes dangerous, Raison said.