Binge Drinking

Ask why binge drinking is a bad habit and you’ll hear plenty of reasons: Too much booze is said to be the cause of issues ranging from impaired judgment to poor grades to the Duke riot of 2010.

But one thing otherwise comprehensive alcohol education programs fail to address is a rather unexpected fact: Downing too many shots of alcohol could weaken the immune system in the hours after a drinking binge.

A study published this past month by the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore found that heavy alcohol consumption in a short period of time disrupts immune systems in healthy adults.

Researchers studied 15 participants who did not have a history of alcohol abuse. In a span of 20 minutes, participants consumed shots of 100-proof ethanol mixed with chilled sugar-free flavored seltzer water. The participants drank four or five shots, depending on weight and sex, to constitute a session of binge drinking.

To measure the immune system’s response, researchers took blood from the participants before the alcohol consumption and after 20 minutes, two hours and five hours of the binge.

They found the number of monocytes and natural killer cells — types of white blood cells that make up the immune system — spiked at 20 minutes, and then decreased at two hours and returned to baseline at five hours, wrote Stephanie Richards, a co-author of the study and a fourth-year medical student at the Maryland School of Medicine, in an email.

This could suggest if someone was in a car accident 20 minutes after binge drinking that they could have an overly inflammatory immune response that would make them more susceptible to conditions such as Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, she wrote.

“On the other hand, if someone were to get into a car accident two hours after binge-drinking while his or her immune system is suppressed,” wrote Richards, who is also a 2007 university alumna, “they might be more susceptible to infections like pneumonia or wound infections.”

Majid Afshar, an alcohol expert at Loyola University Chicago and lead author of the study, said they cannot draw this conclusion definitively from the study because they did not look at people who were hospitalized after binge drinking. But the study demonstrates a significant immune system effect within hours of drinking.

“It certainly shows that your immune system is affected in that it may not behave the way it should if alcohol wasn’t present, and if they’re trying to recover from a serious process,” said Afshar, who worked at the Maryland School of Medicine while completing this study.

Afshar is currently working on a follow-up study that looks at hospital patients who had alcohol-related trauma and studies the effects of binge drinking on their immunological health.

Kenneth Beck, a professor in the public health school at this university, said many studies over the years have shown that people who binge drink are more likely to be at risk of a number of problems, and it is no surprise that they could have disrupted immune systems as well.

“We know that people who take a lot of drugs tend to have a suppressed immune system, which makes them more susceptible to colds and influenza, and other opportunistic diseases like herpes and so forth,” said Beck, who has studied the association between alcohol use, risk-taking behaviors and traffic accidents. “Drug usage in general is generally correlated with that, so it’s not surprising that binge drinking is one particular example of how drug use or abuse would have this affect as well.”

Jessica Bediako, this university’s campus alcohol programs coordinator, wrote in an email that the university works to continue providing new information to students about the dangers of alcohol, including the fact that it can keep a body from functioning at its optimal level in a variety of ways.

Afshar said separate studies have shown how drunk mice are more prone to pneumonia, intoxicated rats bleed more and inebriated humans develop weakened immune systems over time. But this study shows that the immunological effects of binge drinking could take hold in a matter of hours.

Along with binge drinking’s other adverse effects, such as increased risk for traumatic injury, an immune deficit could have a compounding effect: Not only could drinking make one more likely to get injured, but it could also complicate recovery.