Drinkers urged to take three day booze break

24th October 2011 - Doctors are calling for guidelines on safe drinking to be clarified so that people are aware that how often they drink alcohol is an important risk factor for liver disease.

Current Department of Health guidelines say that women who regularly drink between two and three units a day and men drink between three and four units are unlikely to come to harm. It defines regular drinking as every day or on most days. This works out at a sensible weekly limit of 28 units for men and 21 for women.

Risk factor

In a written submission to the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) says that the "suggestion that daily drinking is low risk runs against evidence which suggests that frequency of drinking is a significant risk factor for the development of alcohol dependency, and the development of alcoholic liver disease".

Sir Ian Gilmore, the RCP's special adviser on alcohol, says in a statement: "In addition to quantity, safe alcohol limits must also take into account frequency. There is an increased risk of liver disease for those who drink daily or near daily compared with those who drink periodically or intermittently.x`

"We recommend a safe alcohol consumption limit of between 0 - 21 units a week for men and 0 - 14 units a week for women provided the total amount is not drunk in one or two bouts and that there are two to three alcohol free days a week. At these levels, most individuals are unlikely to come to harm."

Latest NHS figures show that there were around 1,057,000 hospital admissions related to alcohol consumption in England in 2009-10. This was a 12% increase on the 2008-9 figure, where there were 945,500 such admissions and over double the number in 2002-3 when there were around 510,800 admissions.

Alcohol breaks

The original government guidance on how much people could safely drink was drawn up by the RCP in 1987. It sanctioned a limit of up to 21 units for men and 14 for women, and included the recommendation of two or three days a week without alcohol.

However, the RCP told the Committee that when a working group, predominantly made up of civil servants from across Whitehall, reviewed the advice in 1995, it replaced weekly guidelines with daily limits which appeared to sanction daily - or near daily - drinking. This had the effect of removing the recommendation to have drink-free days, while raising the weekly limit for men from 21 to 28 units - an increase of 30%.

Older drinkers

The RCP also told the Committee that it backed the idea of a review into safe drinking guidelines for older people. It said the elderly were more vulnerable to harm from the effects of alcohol. It said a report published earlier this year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggested a 'safe limit' for older men of 11 units per week and seven units for women.

A spokesman for the Department of Health told BootsWebMD that there were no plans to change the current alcohol advice.