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The last time that lawyer Erika Byrd escaped from a alcohol rehab center, her father took her to lunch.
"Dad, I know what alcohol did to me," she told him that day in January 2011. "I know what it did to you." and to my mother, but it was not me. "
At the time of his death, three months later, Byrd had blocked his parents' appeals, as they continued to make her commit involuntarily. One day, a magistrate held a hearing on his hospital bed. He ordered that he undergo a month of hospital treatment.
Byrd, who died in April 2011 at the age of 42, is part of the growing number of people killed by alcohol in the United States over the past decade.
This is an increase that has been overshadowed by the epidemic of opioids. But alcohol kills more people each year than overdoses – by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, pancreatitis and suicide, among others.
From 2007 to 2017, the number of deaths attributable to alcohol has increased by 35%, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington. The death rate has increased by 24%.
An alarming statistic: deaths among women increased by 67%. Women once drank much less than men and their more moderate consumption helped prevent heart disease, offsetting some of the damage.
Deaths among men increased by 29%.
While the number of alcohol-related deaths among adolescents had decreased by about 16% over the same period, the number of deaths among people aged 45 to 64 has increased by About a quarter.
Of course, the risk of death increases with age. The novelty is that alcohol is more and more the cause.
"The story is that no one has noticed that," says Max Griswold, who helped establish the liquor estimates for the institute. "We have not really done any research before."
The District of Columbia, located less than 15 km from Venable Law Firm where Byrd was a partner, had the country 's highest alcohol mortality rate, according to the institute' s analysis. Georgia and Alabama were in second and third place.
Alabama, in fact, ranked third among States with the strictest alcohol control policies, as reported by medical researchers in a 2014 report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
States can influence alcohol consumption – especially dangerous drinking – with measures such as alcohol taxes and restrictions where and when it can be sold.
Psychologist Benjamin Miller, head of strategy at the Well Being Trust, said the biggest health problems in the South are behind the high rate of alcohol-related mortality. Southern states are generally at the bottom of the national rankings for cancer, cardiovascular disease and general health.
The researchers reported that Oklahoma, Utah, Kansas and Tennessee complemented the five states with the most stringent alcohol control policies. States with stricter alcohol control policies had lower rates of excessive alcohol consumption.
Nevada, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming and Wisconsin had the weakest alcohol control policies.
David Jernigan, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and a 30-year veteran of alcohol research, notes that the beer industry is very active in Wisconsin.
Excessive consumption of alcohol sends many more people to emergency rooms, a team of researchers announced in the February 2018 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
The researchers, who examined emergency visits from 2006 to 2014, found that the largest increases were among middle-aged people, particularly women. The number of excessive teen drinkers landing in emergencies during this period has actually decreased.
Older drinkers, often all their lives, do not just need to be pumped into the stomach. They often have multiple complications related to their consumption of alcohol.
The often bulbous belly must be drained, which results in cirrhosis of the liver and its lungs must be cleared of aspirated vomit, says Dr. Anthony Marchetti, doctor of the Emergency Room at the Upson Regional Medical Center. Thomaston, Georgia.
They may also have cerebral hemorrhages or internal bleeding because alcohol prevents their blood from clotting properly.
According to Marchetti, in the middle age, long-term consumption can also lead to heart failure, infections due to immune suppression, a type of dementia caused by alcohol-induced brain damage, ulcers stomach and a much higher cancer risk.
While the overdose of opioids, which kills about 72,000 people a year, has drawn the attention of the United States, the alcohol epidemic has progressed more slowly, particularly in the Southern states and the capital. About 88,000 people die each year from alcohol.
Worse, alcoholism is more tricky to treat – and to criticize – than opioid addiction.
"Culturally, we made it acceptable to drink but not to go out and get heroin up," Miller said. "Many people will read this and say" What is the problem? "
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this may be a more socially acceptable addiction, but alcoholism is at least three times more expensive to treat than opioid dependence. And it's a midlife crisis much more complicated to solve.
Proven approaches – alcohol taxes and limits on the location and timing of alcohol sales – are often dismissed as the liquor industry has considerable weight with decision-makers.
Ron Byrd says his daughter Erika was "Beautiful on the inside and on the outside."
For him, there is no question about what caused his death.
This is despite the fact that there was no alcohol in her system when she was found dead at home. She was so sick, said Byrd, she had not been able to eat or drink for days.
"The death certificate never says alcoholism," he said. said. "It said cardiac arrhythmia and heart valve disease, but no one in our family had heart problems."
Lawyer Lisa Smith has been recovering for the past decade. The New York woman wrote the memoir "Girl Walks Out a Bar" and co-hosted the Recovery Rocks podcast.
Smith has spoken at legal conferences and law firms such as Byrd's about the dangers of days of intense stress lawyers and dinners filled with alcoholic beverages with their clients. But she fights forces much larger than her profession.
"It's a poison, and we treat it like it's something else because there was a lot of money behind it," she says. "A lot of people get really rich with something toxic for us."
Death of despair
In its Pain in the Nation report this year, the Well Being Trust described drug, alcohol and suicide losses as "desperate deaths."
The three are closely related. Suicide is the third leading cause of alcohol-related death after cancers and digestive diseases. One in five people who die of an overdose of opioids have alcohol in their system at the time of their death.
Drinking can cause cancer throughout the digestive tract, from the mouth to the colon. In the United States, about 15% of breast cancer cases are considered to be caused by alcohol. According to a 2013 report by the American Journal of Public Health, a third of these cases involved women who had drunk 1.5 or fewer drinks a week.
The "direct toxicity" of alcohol damages the nervous system, from the brain to the spinal cord, via the peripheral nerves, says emergency physician Georgia, Marchetti. It is common for people who are in the final phase of alcohol to have numbness in the feet and legs, making walking difficult even without loss of ability.
Emergency rooms are the most expensive place to treat problems. According to the study of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, between 2008 and 2014, the rate of emergency visits involving acute consumption of alcohol has increased by almost 40%. For chronic consumption of alcohol, the rate has increased by almost 60%.
Increases for acute and chronic alcohol use were greater in women.
People who drink throughout their lives develop a tolerance to alcohol. But as they get older, they lose muscle, get fatter and become less tolerant.
This causes an increase in injuries and illnesses, says Rick Grucza, associate professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the Alcoholism study.
But why do so many people drown so much sorrow?
Brenda Padgett thinks it is the postpartum depression that drove her daughter to drink alcohol that finally killed her last year.
Ashley Hartshorn, who lived in Hendersonville, North Carolina, had previously suffered the hearing trauma. his father-in-law killed his girlfriend while she was on the phone.
Hartshorn then testified against him in court, which helped to send him to prison for life.
The depression occurred after the birth of her third child in February 2012.
"She was so eager to stop drinking alcohol, but shame and fear prevented her from allowing herself to ask for help," said Padgett. "Like many, we did not know the effects of alcohol on the body.I thought that she had the time, the time to get to the bottom of things and the time to ask for it. help.
"I've never known that only five years of alcohol abuse could kill such a young man."
Nancy Juracka either. His son Lance died in 2006 after only three years of heavy drinking. He was 36 years old.
Lance Juracka, who grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, knew perfectly the scourge of alcoholism: he knew that an uncle and an aunt were drunk before they were born. He even directed a short documentary on alcohol abuse at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
He started drinking when he found a job in Las Vegas in show reviews – and he was continually offered free drinks.
"Once he tasted alcohol, it really did quickly," says his mother. "I do not understand how Lance's liver went so fast."
He returned to California and eventually returned to his mother's home.
He started a painting business. But his workers told Juracka that he would only drink vodka or sleep.
"I thought I was going to lose my mind, I was so frantic," she says. "I would sit all night with him so he does not choke on that vomit."
Joseph Garbely, a physician specializing in internal medicine and addiction at Caron treatment centers in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, said a study shows that 10% of parents think it's reasonable to reduce their stress by consuming at least two alcoholic drinks a day.
But why? It's not as if alcohol is becoming more and more accepted.
However, consider the lack of public service messages on the excessive effects of alcohol on health and families.
Ali Mokdad is a professor at the Institute of Metrics and Health Assessment. He notes that alcohol-related education is focused on driving while intoxicated.
Miller and others point to the high level of work stress that began to accelerate during the recession, the loneliness of social media and the growing pressures on working mothers.
In fact, social isolation can to be both a cause and the result of excessive consumption of alcohol. Parents whose children have seen themselves drinking between the ages of 20 and 30 often describe drinking in isolation from elderly alcoholics.
Few people who drink excessively in their youth will become alcoholics, let alone drink until they die. Those who are recovering from alcoholism claim that people who turn their excessive drinking into high school or university into a night-time adaptation ritual are the most exposed.
Amy Durham almost died of tobacco six years ago, at the age of 40. She barely drank until the age of 30.
Child of an alcoholic father, Durham never thought that she could or would lose control.
"I did not even know what was happening," she says.
She attributes her fall in alcoholism to unresolved trauma due to the fact that she grew up in a home for alcoholics, at the stress of her job as a school principal, at a romantic relationship "toxic" and grief caused by her inability to get pregnant.
"I just needed to be numb," she says.
Ron Byrd says that Erika also dreamed of having children. After two divorces and stage 3b breast cancer, however, chances are gone.
"She wanted so desperately to have a baby," says Byrd.
Durham is now Director of Caregiving Alumni Relations in Caron, Pennsylvania, where she was treated.
"I was not able to see that my drinking was a problem until it was almost too late," she says. "I limited myself and I would say that I would drink only two glasses of wine in a social setting, then that I would go home and that I would drink a lot isolated".
When her father died in July 2012 from an esophageal cancer, Durham said, she started a "very bad downward spiral".
She remembers her funeral.
"I was trying to look nothing like my dad, but I could not wait to get out of this church and drink," she says. "The shame of what was happening was more than I could bear."
Like Hartshorn and Byrd, Durham started with white wine. But she ended up drinking a lot of vodka.
By the time her family took her to the hospital, Durham was in triple organ failure and had fallen into a coma for 10 days.
This was followed by six weeks of dialysis.
When she came into rehab after dialysis, Durham said that her body and eyes were still yellow and that she was carrying an extra 100 pounds of fluid, half of which was in her legs.
She says that other residents in rehabilitation – not unknown signs of addiction – quickly looked away when she passed.
Men against women drinkers
According to Mokdad, when men break up and burn with alcohol, the show is often public. They fight in bars, are cited by police for drunk driving or lose their jobs.
A more typical trajectory for women begins with evening wine as a way to relax after a day of work, whether in a professional setting or at home with young children.
Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, podcast co-host and author of "Sippy Cups are not for Chardonnay", thinks this stems from roles and norms that are stubbornly linked to sex.
"The moms just will not call home and say they're stopping for a drink after work with friends or going to the gym to relax," said the Los Angeles woman. said
Otherwise, they may have the impression of parental failure if they compare themselves to other mothers. So, they drink wine while they are preparing dinner, which can result in a nocturnal tendency to excessive consumption of alcohol.
This describes Eileen O. Grady, a nurse practitioner, who stopped drinking 12 years ago.
O 'Grady, who lives in McLean, Virginia, said that his two sons, now in college, had never really seen him drunk. But she could not bear the thought of continuing her double destructive life. She was constantly drinking dinner until she fell asleep, she said, and then started again the next evening.
For O & # 39; Grady, the last drop came after a night of drinking with another mother from her neighborhood.
The other woman, a teacher, vomited in the car of O. Grady. She came back the next day to clean it up.
O 'Grady did not take a drink.
"I could see my life if I continued," says O & # 39; Grady. She is now active in her local recovery community and works as a wellness coach.
Her teacher friend taught classes until last fall. A few days after leaving the class, she was in the hospital with terminal liver disease.
She died in a hospice on January 3rd.
At least 15 people at the women's memorial service asked O & # 39; Grady how her friend had died. They were stunned to learn that alcohol was the cause.
The woman poisoned herself with half a gallon of vodka a day, says O & # 39; Grady, but no one knew her close family, O & # 39; Grady and a mutual friend in the neighborhood.
"We are locked up," says O & # 39; Grady. "We are not in bars fighting."
As for Durham, she was on a list of liver transplants for about five months in 2011 and 2012. She then learned that she no longer needed a new liver.
"The livers have a great ability to recover," says Dr. Michael Lucey, professor and head of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology of the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine.
Durham was once part of a sorority at the University of Mississippi, where the beauty was competitive and where the popular saying was, "It's beautiful as it's beautiful."
"But there was nothing good about my drinking," she says.
According to Durham, if she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she would not hesitate to seek treatment and talk about it.
Durham stopped drinking six years ago on Thursday. She says she surprises people with the frankness with which she shares the details of her imminent death experience.
"I want to show the world what the recovery looks like, especially for women where the stigma is still the same," Durham said. "I want people to know that there is hope."
Erika Byrd called her father in a state of nervous breakdown on April 9, 2011. She had been fired after failing to submit documents to continue to obtain disability coverage from her law firm.
"I do not want it, but I want it," Byrd recalls, sobbing.
"I said:" If you can stop drinking, you can do anything, "Byrd says. "I told him: 'We love you, Erika,' and she hung up."
Byrd and his wife were preparing to go to church the next day when someone knocked on the door. A pastor was standing with a policeman. Erika was dead.
A doctor at the National Institute of Mental Health phoned to ask if the Byrd would consider donating Erika's brain for research.
They said yes.
"She had done everything she knew to overcome this terrible disease," says Ron Byrd. "I would think she would like it."
If you want to connect with online people who have overcome or are currently experiencing health issues mentioned in this article, join USA TODAY's Facebook support group "I Survived It".
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