Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be

talking to you about alcoholic liver disease and some of the other negative effects of alcohol,

particularly alcohol dependent syndrome. If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at 0.com

slash a.l. Or in the gastroenterology section of the 0.2finals medicine book. So let's get

straight into it. The use of alcohol comes with several problems. Alcohol causes damage to various

tissues in the body and can also lead to something called

alcohol dependence syndrome. Here we're going to cover alcoholic liver disease and alcohol dependence

and touch on some of the other harmful effects of alcohol consumption. So alcoholic liver

disease results from the effects of long term excessive consumption of alcohol on the liver.

The onset and progression of alcoholic liver disease varies between people,

and this suggests that there may be some genetic predisposition to the harmful effects of alcohol on the liver,

with some people able to tolerate a lot more alcohol than others.

There's a stepwise progression of damage to the liver in alcoholic liver disease.

The first step is alcohol-related fatty liver, and this is where drinking leads to the

build-up of fat in the liver.

And if the drinking stops, this process reverses in about two weeks.

The second step is alcoholic hepatitis,

and this is where drinking alcohol over a long period of time causes inflammation in the liver.

Binge drinking is associated with the same effect and mild alcoholic hepatitis is usually reversible with permanent abstinence but if you continue to drink and there's

moderate or severe hepatitis it usually progresses onto the third step and the third step is cirrhosis

and this is where the liver is made up of

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