Warning that drinking ANY amount of alcohol may raise risk of 60 diseases trends now
Drinking alcohol can increase your risk of developing 60 diseases, a major study suggests.
Liver cirrhosis — scarring caused by continuous, long-term liver damage — strokes and cancer are already well-established risks of excess boozing.
But Oxford University researchers, who analysed data from half a million men living in China, have now found it can raise the risk of gout and cataracts.
Other disorders never-before-linked to booze in the study include fractures, lung cancer and circulatory diseases.
Some of the links were apparent for low amounts of alcohol, even intake below NHS guidelines.
Experts said the findings show that drinking alcohol is liked to a 'much wider range of diseases' than previously thought.
Researchers in the UK and Australia noted that while alcohol is responsible for 'substantial disease' around the world, their findings suggest it 'may actually be beneficial' for inflammation
Excessive alcohol consumption is estimated to be behind around 3million deaths worldwide each year.
The NHS advises men and women drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week, with one unit being half a pint of beer or a small glass of wine.
But the World Health Organization (WHO) says that no amount of alcohol is safe.
However, this is fiercely debated. Studies have suggested that a glass of wine or pint of beer a day can stave off a host of illnesses.
Researchers from Oxford teamed up with academics at both Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences for the study.
They examined data from a Chinese database containing the health information of more than 512,000 adults, aged 52 on average. It included details on their drinking patterns.
About a third of men drank alcohol regularly — at least once a week — while the rate was just two per cent among women.
As a result, women were used as a control group to confirm that excess disease risk in men were caused by alcohol drinking, rather than a mechanism related to genetic variants.
They analysed hospital records of 12 years to assess how alcohol affected the risk of developing 207 different diseases. Some weren't medical diseases as such, with transport
