Dr. Miriam Stoppard: "The number of liver transplants is increasing as more Britons drink" – Miriam Stoppard

Four pints a day? Does not that look like a lot?

Yet despite the NHS guidelines, it is adults who regularly drink this amount and who may need a liver transplant because of alcoholic cirrhosis.

The experts at the Royal Free Hospital in North London gave this warning, announcing that the 2,000th patient would have a transplant at the hospital.

The proportion of liver transplants performed in patients with alcohol-related illness has increased by 50% over the past 15 years.

Alcohol-related liver disease is the main reason a transplant is performed because liver recipients no longer have to abstain from drinking six months before the operation.

However, they must make a commitment to stop drinking afterwards.

Researchers from the University of California followed a group of nearly 33,000 people who had a liver transplant between 2002 and 2016.

Over time, the rate of alcohol-related liver disease (ALD) has increased, so that more than two-thirds of the transplants performed involve patients with ALD.

In the United Kingdom, alcohol abuse leads to heavy drinking and more than 400 patients are waiting for a liver transplant at any time, raising questions about who should be given priority and why.

The demographics of people who top the waiting list have changed, as have their long-term prospects.

Alcoholism is still stigmatized and, from a medical point of view, doctors thought that patients with a history of alcoholism could "waste" a new organ if they continued drinking afterwards. transplant.

But in the 1980s, medical guidelines were relaxed and ALD sufferers were only allowed on the waiting list of transplants if they proved that they were serious and healthy. Would not drink for six months before surgery.

Two studies then confirmed that the prospects for people with DLA were good after a transplant. Since then, the number of people transplanted for the disease has increased.

A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that the chances of survival are about as good for patients with ALD as for those whose transplant has nothing to do with the consumption of ALD. alcohol.

The caveat is that drinkers need special support to maintain a healthy lifestyle because lifelong help is needed to manage the underlying cause of alcoholism.