(OPINION) Alcohol use has been linked to 61 different diseases, most of which had not been identified as having drinking-related outcomes by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to a new study.
Beyond the more widely known conditions — such as liver cirrhosis, stroke, and gastric cancers — a new study identified links to diseases including gout, cataracts, ulcers, and some fractures, according to a press release announcing the findings.
Researchers from the University of Oxford in England and Peking University in Beijing analyzed self-reported data from more than 512,000 adults in China related to 207 total diseases.
One-third of the men and just 2% of the women said they drank alcohol regularly (at least once a week).
Among the men, researchers looked at 12 years of hospital records, as well as genetic information, to determine whether alcohol consumption was linked to any of the diseases they developed.
Higher amounts of consumption correlated to a higher risk of disease and hospitalization, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Medicine on June 8.
For every four drinks per day, the risk of alcohol-related diseases increased by 14%, while it rose 6% for diseases that hadn’t been previously linked to alcohol.
“Alcohol drinking adversely affects a wide range of diseases, more than what we previously knew,” said lead author Dr. Pek Kei Im, an intermediate research fellow at Oxford Population Health, in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“Furthermore, the association of alcohol consumption with the overall risk of these diseases is likely to be causal in a dose-response manner (i.e., the more you drink, the higher disease risk), and our findings do not support the belief that there are health benefits of moderate drinking.”
