Partying it up
on St. Patrick's Day?

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Jane Weaver

Health editor

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Pity the poor liver
If you're planning to drink this St. Patrick's Day, take things slowly, experts advise. The liver, which processes about 95 percent of the alcohol that is consumed, can metabolize only about one drink per hour. Downing it any faster overloads the liver's capacity to process the alcohol and causes a person's blood alcohol content to rise rapidly.

"Our bodies have an amazing capacity to clean up our messes but when you dump in a big load of alcohol we quickly exceed the capacity of our enzymes and metabolic defenses against alcohol," says Naimi. "There are cognitive, neurological and gastro-intestinal effects from one really big drinking bout."

For young people, the damage can be substantial because the adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of alcohol. Young brains are still developing and abuse of alcohol can interfere with the development of areas that affect memory, explains Monti.

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In studies on rats, researchers at the Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that getting plastered can affect verbal IQ and working memory in adolescent brains. "Large quantities of alcohol produce brain damage, especially repeated exposure, to the regions that are responsible for learning memory and mood," says Kim Nixon, a research associate at the center.

Although 21 years is the legal drinking age, many researchers say the brain continues to develop until one's mid-20s.

The good news is, most bingers aren't alcoholics and "for a lot of the people who get drunk on St. Patrick's Day, nothing bad will happen," says Naimi.

"But the bottom line is that over time binge drinking is dangerous, just like high blood pressure is dangerous, high cholesterol is dangerous."

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