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Abstract
A significant percentage of population is at risk of alcohol’s harmful effects on bone. The maintenance of healthy bone in human adults occurs through a process called” bone remodeling”. This process can be interfered on long term consumption of alcohol, resulting in decreased bone density and increased risk of fracture. Heavy drinking is well known to be associated with osteoporosis and osteoporotic fractures in chronic alcoholic. Epidemiologic studies have shown that long-term heavy drinkers have multiple risk factors for bone loss, including low dietary calcium and other nutritional deficiencies, low body weight, smoking, and a high caffeine intake. Alcohol is directly toxic to bone and may disrupt bone metabolism. Those effects may be exerted directly or indirectly through the many cell types, hormones, and growth factors that regulate bone metabolism. Even more provocative, some recent studies find that moderate intake of alcohol may actually protect against the loss of bone mass that characterizes the disease osteoporosis. Despite the difficulty of establishing with certainty how and to what extent alcohol affects bone and the risk of fracture, this issue is an important one for public health. Modern-day scientific research on fracture prevalence in alcoholic subjects is based for the most part on small, inadequately controlled studies composed mostly of men."Many people know about alcohol's effects on the liver and the damage it can cause to this organ after years of heavy drinking," said Terrence M. Donohue, Jr., VA Research Career Scientist at the Omaha VA Medical Center and professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "Considerably fewer people know about alcohol-induced bone disease."