Alcohol, Muscle Harm Linked

A lifetime of heavy alcohol abuse can damage the heart by weakening the body’s muscles, according to a new study. Researchers concluded that people risk muscle damage if their lifetime consumption of pure alcohol is more than 13 kilograms for each kilogram of body weight. This is the equivalent of a 150-pound man drinking more than 12 ounces of whiskey a day for 20 years.

Doctors long assumed that weakness among heavy drinkers, a condition called chronic alcoholic myopathy, resulted from malnutrition, because alcoholics often eat poorly.

However, the new study found that such muscle wasting, including weakness of the heart muscle, was also common among alcoholics who lived in stable homes and ate well.

The study was conducted on 50 alcoholic men by Dr. Alvaro Urbano-Marquez and colleagues from the University of Barcelona in Spain. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They found that one-third of the alcoholics had weakness of the heart muscle, and nearly half had abnormalities in other muscles.