The First Year of Covid-19 Saw a Surge in Booze-Fueled Liver Injuries, Study Finds

The first year of the covid-19 pandemic helped fuel a spike of boozy liver injuries in the U.S., recent research suggests. The study found a jump in reported hospitalizations from alcohol-related hepatitis across the U.S. in 2020—even above the steady increases seen in past years. Deaths from these injuries substantially increased in 2020 as well.

The pandemic caused plenty of upheaval in our lives, especially early on. One of the more apparent changes was people buying and presumably drinking more alcohol at home. According to a 2021 study, for instance, liquor store sales rose by 20% percent from March to September 2020, relative to the previous year. While this increase was tempered somewhat by reduced sales at bars and restaurants during the same time, other data has indicated that overall alcohol consumption did climb during the first year of covid-19.

At the time, many experts warned that this surge in alcohol use could have dangerous consequences, given the drug’s well-known health effects. One of these expected consequences would be a rise in alcohol-related hepatitis (liver inflammation). And it seems that this prediction was on the money. In a study published last year, for instance, a team of researchers found an increase in hospitalizations from alcohol-related hepatitis within a large hospital system in California. That same team has now conducted research looking at nationwide trends in these injuries.

The team analyzed data from the National Inpatient Sample, a database that records hospitalizations from 37 states, tracking cases from 2016 to 2020. Prior to the pandemic, they found a clear year-to-year increase in hospitalizations, amounting to an annual 5.1% rise between 2016 to 2019. But from 2019 to 2020, hospitalizations rose by over 12%, with 190,770 cases in total. This relative increase was even more pronounced in younger people, with hospitalizations among people 18 to 44 rising by nearly 20% in 2020. And while men are more likely to develop the condition, the rise in 2020 was slightly higher in women.

The team’s findings were published last month in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences.

“Severe liver disease seems to be rising over time, but it appears to have increased even more dramatically during the pandemic,” said senior study author Kris Kowdley, a professor at Washington State University and director of the Liver Institute Northwest, in a statement provided by the university.

Alcohol-related hepatitis tends to be caused by heavy drinking over a sustained period of time, and by the time it’s diagnosed, it can turn into a life-threatening emergency. The researchers found that these cases didn’t just become more common during the first year of the pandemic, but also deadlier. In 2020, deaths rose by more than 24% relative to 2019, with over 11,000 people dying overall. Other research has suggested that alcohol-related deaths in general rose during 2020.

While covid-19 is still around and worth caring about, the situation is substantially better than it was back in 2020. And the effects of the pandemic on U.S. alcohol consumption seem to have since waned. But alcohol has been a major killer in the U.S. for quite a while, so a return to the status quo isn’t something to be too happy about. The authors warn that even a short term boost of alcohol use in the population is likely to have long term effects.

“Our findings highlight the urgent need for concerted efforts on the part of health care providers and policy makers for early identification, treatment and primary prevention of alcohol use disorder to prevent the tsunami of alcohol-related liver disease in the coming years,” they wrote.

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