Liver disease Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

November 6, 2022

U.S. research offers sobering look at lethal damage caused by alcohol

The liquor cabinets, beer coolers and wine cellars in our homes harbor one of the most pernicious substances in U.S. households, a leading (but often overlooked) cause of preventable death and debilitation: Yes, alcohol itself. Federal officials estimate that 1 in 8 deaths of Americans ages 20 to 64 results from injuries or illnesses tied to excessive drinking.

And if you look only at the prime ages of 20 to 49, the booze toll is tied to 1 in 5 U.S. deaths, according to a study newly published on the medical JAMA Network.

The study’s authors, researchers with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said their startling data likely underestimate of alcohol’s huge economic and health harms on U.S. lives, the New York Times reported, noting:

May 31, 2022

Focus on surging pandemic dims as two other infections grab headlines

by Patrick A. Malone

The coronavirus pandemic continues to give Americans a crash course in global infectious diseases, with experts and regular folks warily watching not only the virus’s continuing summer surge but also seeing with concern increasing incidences of rare hepatitis cases in kids and outbreaks of monkeypox in travelers and among partying gay men.

While the other infections have received their share of news coverage, the pandemic persists as the nation’s leading public health menace, as the New York Times reported in this summary of the latest overall coronavirus situation:

“The United States is averaging about 110,000 new cases each day, a roughly 30% increase over the last two weeks. Since many cases go uncounted in official reports, the true toll is higher than these figures show. Daily case reports are four times as high as they were in early April, but still a fraction of the numbers seen in January, when the initial Omicron surge was at its worst.

January 16, 2020

Spiking death rate a harsh reminder of alcohol’s risks, especially for women

by Patrick A. Malone

Tipple much, much less in 2020. That might be a life-saving bit of advice for too many Americans to follow, especially because of new data on a worrisome spike in alcohol-related deaths.

As NBC News reported, based on published research by federal researchers:

“The yearly total of alcohol-related deaths for people ages 16 and over more than doubled, from 35,914 in 1999 to 72,558 in 2017. There were almost 1 million such deaths overall in that time. While middle-age men accounted for the majority of those deaths, women — especially white women — are catching up, the study found. That’s concerning in part because women’s bodies tend to be more susceptible to the effects of alcohol.”

February 12, 2019

OxyContin reformulation faulted in 222% spike in hepatitis C infections

by Patrick A. Malone

Investigators have teased out yet another damaging thread in the villainous web of harms of the opioid crisis. A spike in hepatitis C infections is a costly, long-term, and major health consequence of the hype and disastrous reformulation of OxyContin, the powerful painkiller made by Purdue Pharmaceuticals owned by the wealthy Sackler family.

Purdue, in the 1990s, promoted and sold OxyContin to doctors and hospitals in a relentless campaign that stressed how this drug was supposedly safer and longer acting, releasing its potent effects over as long as a 12-hour span instead of requiring many pills that needed to be taken more often.

Although those claims of the drug’s benefits were dubious to start, patients — especially those abusing the highly addictive prescription medication — found they could get around OxyContin’s delayed release, getting an immediate jolt or walloping high, by crushing their pills. They then snorted Oxy as a powder or mixed it with a liquid and injected it.

July 24, 2018

More bad booze news: Liver disease deaths are rising, especially among young

by Patrick A. Malone

Summer tipplers may want to steer away from that second glass of sangria, or rethink that next round of beers. That’s because there’s yet more bad news about Americans and booze abuse: Liver disease deaths are spiking, with fatalities tied to cirrhosis jumping by 65 percent between 1999 and 2016, while those connected with liver cancer doubled in the same time span.

Americans 25- to 34-years-old saw the steepest increases in alcohol-related liver disease, with the number of annual deaths in seven years, as studied by Michigan experts, nearly tripling.

“Alcohol misuse and its complications” is striking down a new generation of Americans, Elliot Tapper, a University of Michigan liver expert and lead author of a newly published study on liver cancer, told the Washington Post.

June 17, 2018

NIH ripped for Big Alcohol funding and advising on $100-million drinking study

by Patrick A. Malone

The National Institutes of Health, perhaps the world’s leading medical research institution, has moved fast to try to fix self-inflicted damage to its reputation caused by a controversial $100-million study on alcohol and its harms.

NIH Director Francis Collins halted the study, and an advisory group backed his action, lambasting researchers for soliciting funding and counsel from the alcohol industry for a work that purported to answer key and fundamental questions about booze but from its outset leaned toward seeing benefit in moderate drinking.

The New York Times deserves credit for digging into the dubious actions by researchers supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, an arm of NIH.

February 16, 2018

For expectant moms, new study’s findings raise a red flag on alcohol use

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as the nation struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, it’s clear that more public health effort needs to be directed at helping expectant mothers understand how much substances they ingest can harm their kids.

The New York Times reported that a new study published in the JAMA medical journal has conservatively estimated that “fetal alcohol spectrum disorders affect 1.1 to 5 percent of children in the country, up to five times previous estimates.”

August 16, 2017

While other addictions hit crisis levels, we can’t ignore soaring alcohol woes

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s more than happy hour chardonnays with office mates or malt liquors at a summer barbecue.

Public health experts are warning that alcohol drinking is rising sharply, and in especially worrisome fashion for women, seniors, African Americans, Latinos, and Americans of Asian descent. As the nation struggles with addiction crises—especially a plague of opioid drug abuse—booze woes may be getting less than their deserved attention.

Our heavy and increasing alcohol consumption, as captured in a sizable and regular survey of Americans’ tippling habits, should be of big concern. That’s because experts note that it can “portend increases in many chronic co-morbidities in which alcohol use has a substantial role.”

December 27, 2016

Happier new year? Don’t overdo holiday eating, drinking, travel, socializing

by Patrick A. Malone

Here’s hoping the holidays are going well for one and all. But, even as they fly away, moderation and some common sense about the seasonal celebrations is worth keeping in mind.

It can pay, for example, to be careful about what you eat in this festive time. Researchers at the RAND Corporation have just issued a study that finds that consumers are “more likely to choose unhealthy foods from November to December, and the subsequent holiday pounds they gain account for 60 percent to 70 percent of the weight they gain per year.” We’re all too inclined, the researchers said, to feast on “nutritionally undesirable foods” such as sugar-sweetened beverages, chocolates, cookies, candy, and ice cream, leading to added pounds that, alas, don’t go away quickly or easily. Bah, humbug, perhaps to these findings based on information on eating habits of 400,000 South Africans who were followed for four years? Or maybe the calorie-conscious might want to consider the Washington Post’s menu of party options and alternatives?

Or how about following the New York Times’ timely report on how the holidays—with their increased eating and drinking and staying up late or sleeping in—confuse our livers, those vital organs that researchers say closely follow circadian rhythms as they help to filter the blood and to regulate critical body chemistries to process food and liquids, including alcohol.

November 25, 2016

For Kentucky’s sick and poor, health policy controversies are harsh realities

by Patrick A. Malone

Although the partisan wrangling over what’s next with American health care seems to ignore the maddening realities confronting patient-consumers, a new look at the plight of poor Kentuckians provides a harsh look at the collision of many major health policy controversies including soaring drug prices, the Affordable Care Act, and the prescription drug abuse crisis.

Stat, the online health news site, deserves credit for the grim picture it painted of health care dysfunction in the nation’s heartland. Kentucky has been ravaged not only by opioid drug abuse, including record numbers of overdose deaths, it also is struggling with a stark, related rise in diseases. In particular, cases of Hepatitis C have skyrocketed by 364 percent in Kentucky and surrounding states. Infections are growing most among young, rural whites, and to the growing concern of public health officials, Kentucky is recording increasing numbers of cases in which pregnant moms are infecting their babies.

Hepatitis C, a viral infection that damages the liver and is a factor in 19,000 Americans’ death annually, can lurk in the body for long periods before becoming deadly. As many as 4 million Americans may carry it and not know it until their liver damage becomes severe. The virus (depicted in the illustration above) spreads among addicts of pain-killing medications because they too often progress from prescription pill-popping to shooting up other increasingly powerful opioids like fentanyl and heroin.