How one night of drinking can kill you
Whether you go to a big party or a dinner with a few friends, drinking is typically on the menu. While most of us know what the long-term effects of alcohol are, we may not realize that one night of drinking can be even more dangerous.
On Feb. 4, 2016 Brady Grattan from Fredericton, N.B. died after a night of drinking. It took only 2 ½ hours of playing beer pong for the 18-year-old to end up on life support in the ICU. The drinking game is typically played with beer, but Grattan was using hard liquor instead. While stories like this are rarely reported on, more parents are coming forward to share their tragedies in the hopes that teens realize the dangers associated with drinking.
In another tragic case, Shelby Lyn Allen was found dead after a night of heavy drinking with her friends in 2008. The 17-year-old from California drank 15 shots of vodka in less than an hour. Once she started vomiting, her friends propped her up next to the toilet and went to bed. Allen, who was a high school junior at the time, died of alcohol poisoning.
(Shelby with her mom, Debbie; courtesy: Shelby’s Rules Foundation)
Aaron White, a neuroscientist from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Maryland, says alcohol poisoning is a toxic state where your body is at risk of shutting down because you’ve reached such a high blood alcohol content (BAC).
Oftentimes young people don’t know what a standard drink is and can easily overdo it. White says even though alcohol is a relatively safe drug, it can quickly become toxic.
“Alcohol is really a tale of two drugs. At low doses it’s relatively safe, but at high doses it can be lethal. Unfortunately the distance between the low dose and the high dose isn’t that big. That’s what often gets people into trouble.”
When you reach the toxic state, you shut down areas of the brainstem that control your vital reflexes.
“These little switches in the base of your brain that keep you breathing, keep your heart beating, make you gag if something is blocking the airway. These switches get flipped off and you can die.”
When you drink, the alcohol follows the same path no matter how much you consume. It goes through the stomach, gets absorbed by the intestine, through the liver and then makes its way up to the brain. The amount you drink determines how much impairment there is in the brain.
“If you drink a lot quickly, the brain is literally caught off guard and it’s more disruptive than if you were to drink slowly throughout an evening. The brain will literally adjust while you’re drinking, but if you drink quickly the brain has no way to prepare itself for the alcohol and it just gets hammered.”
White recommends eating before drinking as food helps slow how quickly the alcohol hits the brain.
“If you have food in your stomach, the peak amount of alcohol that hits your brain can be reduced by as much as a third.”
While we often hear that our body needs an hour to get rid of one drink, but that’s not always the case. White says your weight will determine how quickly your BAC goes up.
“It could take a long time for that first drink to get out of your body, so if you have a drink within that time frame you’re just building on that BAC.”
We know that drinking a lot and frequently can lead to long-term effects, but we should still pay attention to the short-term dangers.
“One night of binge drinking causes inflammation in the heart muscle, presumably that’s temporary, but it does show you that you are affecting organs of the body for days after your binge-drinking episode.”
White says alcohol also causes inflammation of the brain. When people are hungover, they don’t perform as well.
“Surgeons don’t do surgery as well, pilots don’t fly as well, students don’t think as well. So there is a lingering effect, now that might only last the next day or two after you drink but it is an effect that persists.”
Catherine Paradis, senior research and policy analyst on alcohol for the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, says everyone’s vulnerability to alcohol is different.
“Everyone responds differently to alcohol depending on various physical and emotional factors – how quickly you drink, how much you weigh, how much muscle mass you have. It’s a biological fact, alcohol affects women more quickly than men.”
Paradis says young people are even more at risk when it comes to drinking.
“Their brain is not fully developed and so when they drink that much they are likely to experience long term impact on their memory skills.”
White says the body is quite resilient and if you survive a night of heavy drinking there’s a good chance the body will recover just fine. But if you continue doing it then you increase your odds of diseases like brain damage and cancer. He says it’s important to remember that alcohol is a very powerful drug.
“If recreational drugs were tools, alcohol would be a sledgehammer.”
