Women and the Effects of Alcohol Although

Women and the Effects of Alcohol

Although alcohol use, and even alcohol abuse, is legal for most adults over the age of 21, there is no question that alcohol can have a tremendously negative effect on many of its users. While many people may believe that the negative effects of alcohol are limited to alcoholics and problem drinkers, the reality is that even moderate alcohol consumption can have negative effects on its users. In fact, the many misconceptions about alcohol use have to do with the fact that women and men process alcohol differently, so that the same level of alcohol use in males and females can lead to very different consequences for the users. Women are at higher risk for problems linked to, but not directly caused by, alcohol use, such as drunk driving accidents and interpersonal violence. In addition, "women have higher risk than men for certain serious medical consequences of alcohol use, including liver, brain, and heart damage" (B.T., 2008). In order to understand the magnitude of this difference, one needs only consider that "female alcoholics have death rates 50 to 100% higher than those of male alcoholics" (The Marin Institute, 2006).

The first thing to consider when looking at the impact of alcohol on women is the fact that women are impacted by alcohol in a different way than men. "Women achieve higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood and become more impaired than men after drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol" (B.T., 2008). What this means is that women become intoxicated more quickly than men. Moreover, this differential impact used to be linked to size differentials between men and women, but relative differences in size do not seem to wholly explain the differences in how men and women process alcohol. On the contrary, several factors appear to impact how women process alcohol. First, women have different metabolizes than men. Second, women and men have different brain chemistry, and intoxication is not linked solely to blood alcohol levels, but also to how that alcohol interacts with brain chemistry.

It is easy to envision how become intoxicated more quickly than men can have a negative impact on women. Although the statistics on alcohol use prior to sexual assaults and domestic violence incidents are unreliable, given that both crimes are known to be seriously underreported, those statistics do consistently reveal that alcohol use increases the likelihood that a woman will be a victim of interpersonal violence. This may be due to women having impaired judgment when under the influence, leading them to engage in risk-taking behavior. It may also be due to the fact that male predators are aware of alcohol-use differentials and use alcohol as a means of procuring victims. Whatever the cause, the reality is that alcohol use makes it much more likely that a woman will be the victim of interpersonal violence. Furthermore, this impact seems to occur whether it is the woman or her assailant who is using alcohol. For example,

"in one study of female domestic violence survivors admitted to emergency departments, women whose partners abused alcohol were 3.6 times more likely than other women to be assaulted by their partners" (The Marin Institute, 2006).

Susceptibility to interpersonal violence is only one way that alcohol use can have an immediate negative impact on women. Women are also at greater risk for drunk driving than similarly situated men. "Although women are less likely than men to drive after drinking and to be involved in fatal alcohol-related crashes, women have a higher relative risk of driver fatality than men at similar blood alcohol concentrations. Laboratory studies of the effects of alcohol on responding to visual cues and other tasks suggests that there may be gender differences in how alcohol affects the performance of driving tasks"(B.T., 2008).

Of course, not all of the damaging results of alcohol use are immediate. Instead, some of the serious effects of alcohol use may not be seen immediately, but can be even more damaging than personal violence. For example, women seem to be more heavily impacted by alcohol-related health issues than men. "Compared with men, women develop alcohol-induced liver disease over a shorter period of time and after consuming less alcohol. Women are also more likely than men to develop alcoholic hepatitis and to die from cirrhosis (B.T., 2008). In addition, while alcohol can contribute to heart disease in either gender, women appear to be more susceptible to its impact. "Among heavier drinkers, research shows similar rates of alcohol-associated heart muscle disease (cardiomyopathy) for both men and women, despite women's 60% lower lifetime alcohol use" (B.T., 2008). Furthermore, while alcohol is known to impair brain function in chronic alcohol abusers, this impact seems to disproportionately impact women. "Using MRI, researchers found that a brain region involved in coordinating multiple brain functions was significantly smaller among alcoholic women compared with both nonalcoholic women and alcoholic men" (B.T., 2008). In addition, diseases that predominantly impact women may also be impacted by alcohol use. "Many studies report that moderate to heavy alcohol consumption increases the risk for breast cancer" (B.T., 2008). Obviously, alcohol use, or, at least, heavy alcohol use can have a seriously negative impact on women.