Four to five glasses of wine in two hours - the minimum for "binge drinking" - may help dying gut bacteria leak into your bloodstream, where they can cause unpredictable damage to your health, a new study suggests.
The adverse effects of drinking too much alcohol are well known. Nausea, dizziness, alcohol poisoning, and the dreaded hangover are all commonly attributed to nights where the drinking went too far. Past studies have even indicated that "blackouts" and "brownouts" - which occur when the brain is too inebriated to encode memories properly - can result in rare cases of permanent brain damage.
However, a new study recently published in PLOS ONE suggests that even one night of binge drinking can result in unexpected harm to your body.
"We found that a single alcohol binge can elicit an immune response, potentially impacting the health of an otherwise healthy individual," Dr. Szabo, co-author of the study, said in a statement.
"Our observations suggest that an alcohol binge is more dangerous than previously thought," she added.
According to the study, Szabo and her colleagues gave enough alcohol to 11 men and 14 women to raise their blood-alcohol-levels to at least 0.08 g/dL within an hour. Several blood samples were taken from each patient over the course of this process and then once more afterwards.
Interestingly, the researchers found that as the participants became intoxicated, endotoxin levels rose in their blood. Endotoxins are toxins that escape from certain bacteria when they die, indicating that dying gut bacteria were seeping into the blood stream at a higher rate.
Unfortunately, endotoxins can be unpredictably harmful to an otherwise healthy human, depending on their concentration in the blood. Past studies have shown that immune cells have a tendency to attack these toxins, potentially triggering fever, inflammation, and even tissue damage.
The study was published in PLOS ONE on May 14.