Study Finds Sober Alcoholics Regain Full Life Spans

Alcoholics who stay off the bottle--even after more than 10 years of hard drinking--can live as long as their nonalcoholic counterparts, a new medical study says.

Since discovering that alcoholics tend to die younger than nonalcoholics, doctors have wondered whether the damage wrought by alcohol was permanent. But San Diego researchers said alcoholics who give up drinking will live as long as casual drinkers or even teetotalers.

Giving up drinking “will literally save their lives,” said Dr. Igor Grant, an author of the study, which will be published next week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The study confirms that alcoholics can physically recover and lead full lives--something that many experts believed but for which they lacked evidence.

“The findings are consistent with my experience and most medical professionals’ experiences that, if people do stop drinking, their chances of survival are quite good,” Dr. John Sullivan said. He is medical director of the Francis Scott Key Medical Center’s chemical dependence center in Baltimore and assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Doctors have known that alcoholic men who do not give up the bottle have a death rate five times higher than the average, Grant said. The rates are even more dramatic among young men. Drinking men under age 45 have a mortality rate 10 times as high as their sober counterparts, Grant said.

“The question we wanted to address was, ‘If you are an alcoholic who manages to go on the wagon forever, do you still have premature mortality because you have been an alcoholic for so long and you’ve picked up risks?’ ” said Grant, an assistant chief of psychiatry at the San Diego VA Medical Center.

To explore the question, Grant and his two colleagues followed 199 alcoholic men over an 11-year period. All the men were healthy--except for their drinking--and had been admitted to the VA Medical Center. Grant described them as “still working or functioning.”

Of these men, 101 relapsed and began drinking, and 98 stayed sober. All the men, on average, had been drinking at alcoholic levels for 14.8 years, Grant said.

The researchers also monitored an additional 92 nonalcoholic men as a control group. They were selected to be consistent with their counterparts in terms of age, race and education.

“Among alcoholics who were able to abstain continuously, their mortality rate was no different than their nonalcoholic controls,” said Grant, who hopes to continue the study over a 20-year period. “And those who resumed drinking have a mortality rate five times higher than you’d expect for a person of that race, age and sex.”

The causes of death among all the alcoholics--whether or not they had given up drinking--were varied. They included cancer, heart disease, cirrhosis and bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract, which can result when alcohol enlarges veins in the esophagus and upper stomach.

Grant and his co-authors--medical student Kim Bullock and Robert J. Reed, a senior research associate at UC San Diego’s psychiatry department--also monitored the groups for their smoking histories.

They found that, even though the abstaining alcoholics smoked substantially more than the nonalcoholic control group, it had no significant impact on the differences in mortality rates. Both groups of alcoholics were heavy smokers, puffing an average of eight packs a week.

Grant said he now wonders about the rarely studied social drinkers--those who drink up to five cocktails a day.

“Do these heavy social drinkers also have excessive mortality rates?” Grant asked. “If they do, by cutting down, could they achieve longer life? It’s an unanswered question.”