Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
close window
Housecall Archives
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
close window
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risk factors
By Mayo Clinic staffRisk factors for alcoholic hepatitis include:
- Alcohol use. Consistent heavy drinking or binge drinking is the primary risk factor for alcoholic hepatitis, though it's hard to precisely define what constitutes heavy drinking because people vary greatly in their sensitivity to alcohol. Moderate drinking is generally defined as no more than two drinks a day for men and one for women. Binge drinking is usually defined as more than four alcoholic drinks in a two-hour period for women, and more than five drinks in two hours for men. Also a matter of debate is whether certain types of alcohol cause more harm than others. Some experts believe that wine is less damaging than hard liquor is because ounce per ounce, wine drinkers may end up consuming less alcohol overall. However, it may just be that wine drinkers generally tend to have healthier lifestyles.
- Your sex. Women have a higher risk of developing alcoholic liver disease than men do. This disparity may result from differences in the way alcohol is absorbed and broken down. Because women tend to metabolize alcohol more slowly, their livers are exposed to the higher blood concentrations of alcohol for longer periods of time — with potentially greater toxicity. The slow rate of alcohol metabolism in women may be due to lower levels of stomach enzymes that break down alcohol, the effects of estrogen or even the size of a woman's liver.
- Genetic factors. Researchers have discovered a number of genetic mutations that affect the way alcohol is metabolized in the body. Having one or more of these mutations may increase the risk of alcoholic liver disease and liver cancer.
