GI and Liver Diseases Linked to Alcohol Spiked During Pandemic medscape.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medscape.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Inpatient consults for alcohol-related gastrointestinal (GI) and liver diseases have surged since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and remained elevated, a new study finds.The proportion of patients that required inpatient endoscopic .
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With lockdowns becoming a crucial measure to contain COVID-19, people are staying indoors virtually locked away from the outside world. Now, a new study has found an alarming surge in the number of consultations for alcohol-related gastrointestinal (GI) and liver diseases even after lockdowns, suggesting that the world may have developed a drinking problem en masse due to the pandemic.
According to the new research, the rise in the number of consultations for alcohol-related diseases continues to remain consistently elevated long after the beginning of the pandemic. Also, the percentage of patients requiring endoscopic interventions has also risen, serving as an indicator of the visible severity of the disease.
There has been no shortage of anecdotal evidence that drinking increased during lockdown, but now a documented surge in alcohol-related gastrointestinal and liver disease consultations suggest to Brown University researchers that heavy drinking occurred during the pandemic.
Doctor visits dropped during lockdown while consultations for alcohol-related gastrointestinal issues and liver disease soared according to Dr. Waihong Chung, lead researcher of the study and a research fellow for the Division of Gastroenterology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Chung presented his team’s finding during a Thursday briefing hosted by Digestive Disease Week (DDW) 2021.