You hear this sometimes “oh Jimmy? Yeah he drank himself to death after his wife died” But this actually possible? Does the body reach a point where it can’t process alcohol at a certain point?
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>You hear this sometimes “oh Jimmy? Yeah he drank himself to death after his wife died” But this actually possible? Does the body reach a point where it can’t process alcohol at a certain point?
Yeah, it’s called alcohol poisoning. It disrupts your breathing, heart rate, and can put you into a coma or kill you.
In addition to death from acute alcohol poisoning, “drinking yourself to death” can mean dying from a symptom of alcoholism, like cirrhosis of the liver.
Yes.
This can be “acute” alcohol toxicity where massive ethanol poisoning simply disrupts your nervous system so severely that you stop breathing, or it can be “chronic” toxicity where you destroy your liver, guts, and brain with constant alcohol abuse until some secondary organ failure kills you.
One common issue that causes sudden death from heavy drinking is the liver gets so scarred that is cannot efficiently filter and acts as a huge blood vessel blockage this causes “upstream pressure” on the blood vessel walls and over time they weaken and burst causing serious internal bleeding which can lead to death.
The phrase could mean that he consumed alcohol for an extended period of several days or weeks. The liver has to work hard to remove alcohol from the body. It can regenerate over time, but can get overwhelmed, inflamed and permanently lose its detoxifying function.
Specifically, alcohol is a *GABA agonist*. What that means is that alcohol activates the same receptors that the neurotransmitter GABA activates.
GABA is an important neurotransmitter in your brain that turns neurons off and limits how active they can be. It’s essentially an *off* button for neurons. That is *super* important because without it the neurons would go out of control, causing seizures and other problems. That’s what happens if you drink too much too often and then suddenly stop. Your brain has stopped producing as much GABA, relying on the alcohol to do the job. When you suddenly stop drinking, there isn’t enough GABA to make up for the lack of alcohol and it causes problems.
The flip side is that too much alcohol at one time overwhelms the GABA receptors, limiting the neurons too much. Your brain can’t function and starts shutting down which then affects things like your breathing and heartbeat. This is acute alcohol poisoning.
Alcohol is also mildly toxic to all of your cells, so your liver breaks it down to protect your body. Too much alcohol can overwhelm your liver and damage cells throughout your body. It also thins your blood and damages your blood vessels. So, again, too much at one time will kill you that way.
Chronic overdrinking similarly damages your body, but in smaller bits that your body can’t quite fix, so it accumulates. In particular, alcohol interferes with your liver’s ability to remove scar tissue and regenerate itself. Over time, this causes a build up of scar tissue in your liver, limiting its ability to function to remove other toxins in your body. This is *cirrhosis*. Eventually, toxins start building up that damage your body and you die.
The alcohol is also weakening your blood vessels and damaging your heart, leading to heart disease. So you are also at risk of a heart attack or stroke. Just to make it even worse, alcohol is a mild carcinogen, so it increases your risk of cancer.
To be clear, drinking responsibly is not a significant health risk. Heavy binge drinking and over-drinking often are health problems.
In addition to what everyone else said, withdrawal from alcohol if you’re a heavy drinker can also cause seizures and death.
Too much ethanol at once can indeed lead to death from toxicity. Typically, a BRAC (breath alcohol content) of 0.20 or higher results in a trip to the hospital for monitoring if law enforcement has made an arrest – at least, that was policy where I worked. My personal best (arrest, that is) was 0.349, IIRC. I’ve seen some 0.4 and higher and heard of one guy a tad over 0.50.
Brain damage starts to occur with the higher levels, although functional alcoholics have a greater tolerance and often need a higher BA level just to function. For instance, I once dealt with a girl in her early 20’s that was such a person. She blew a 0.234 and I had no idea she’d even consumed anything. More to the point, neither did my partner and he was a court recognized expert on the matter.
My ex-fiance “drank himself to death” meaning he got acute pancreatitis from binge drinking, did not stop drinking to let his pancreas heal, and developed chronic alcoholic pancreatitis, which eventually sent him into multi-organ failure. Apparently (we were broken up and not in contact by this point) he spent the last few years of his life in and out of hospitals in severe pain (pancreatitis, acute or chronic, can be incredibly painful). He died at age 41.
A good friend, but sadly a chronic alcoholic, messed up his blood vessels so badly he bled out in the street one day. RIP Greg. What a waste of a funny, intelligent, talented life. We miss him, and it’s been years.
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