BACCHUS and tobacco are especially dangerous in adolescents. also for the heart and arteries. In particular, the more you drink when you are very young, the worse the response of the arterial walls tends to be, which become more rigid. In practice, the vessels meet an ipremature aging. Unfortunately, the less elastic the arteries are, the greater the risk of developing heart attacks and strokes in adulthood. To warn teen-agers about the dangers of drinking alcohol, with a particular emphasis on the “binges” that can occur with the phenomenon of “binge drinking” which concentrates the consumption of large quantities of alcohol in a few hours, is an English research, presented with an asbtract at the Congress of the European Society of Cardiology (Esc).
I study
The investigation was coordinated by Hugo Walford, dell’University College London. The study, which also assessed the impact of cigarette smoking at a young age on this particular artery health parameter, looked at 1,655 participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children (Alspac) aged 17 to 24 years. Alcohol and smoking were measured at the age of 17 and 24, and the results at the two time points were combined. Alcohol consumption was classified as total absence of intake, medium (4 drinks or less on a typical drinking day) and high (more than 5 drinks on a typical day). On the cigarette front, the participants were divided into non-smokers, ex-smokers, average consumers (less than 10 cigarettes per day) and heavy smokers (10 or more cigarettes per day).
The arterial stiffness was assessed at the age of 17 and 24 using a non-invasive technique: it is called the carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity. This is a particularly significant parameter for the risk of future cardiovascular diseases, in young people and beyond. In addition to measuring alcohol and smoking consumption in different age groups, also considering different parameters such as gender and social and economic status in the evaluation, the experts also monitored the body mass index, blood pressure, blood sugar, LDL “bad” cholesterol and inflammation, by measuring the C-Reactive protein. In this way it was also possible to evaluate other parameters that could come into play in cardiovascular health.
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Alcohol and arteries
The results? They certainly make you think. On average, the stiffness of the arterial arteries increased by an average of 10.3% from 17 to 24 years, with a slightly higher increase in women than in men. What is most striking, however, is that the lack of elasticity of the arteries tends to progressively increase in relation to the average consumption of alcohol. As for smoking, however the negative effects for those who smoked a lot of cigarettes were observed mainly in young women: the difference in the stiffness of the vessels between non-smokers and heavy smokers allowed to observe was statistically significant in the latter. According to Walford, “the findings suggest that arterial damage occurs in young drinkers and young women who smoke heavily. Those who have never smoked and who have quit have instead shown similar changes in arterial stiffness, which indicates that quitting can restore vascular health at this young age ”. Special attention, according to experts, should be paid to the phenomenon of binge drinking.
A premature aging
In this sense, the results indicate that these behaviors could enable young people to have a sort of “premature aging” of the arteries, detectable by measuring their elasticity. “Binge drinking”, or the use of consuming large quantities of wine, beer and spirits in a few hours all in one evening, can be particularly problematic for adolescents to manage for the body, also because in young people the detoxification systems alcohol ingested may not yet be sufficiently efficient.
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