STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the agreement between four different measures of alcohol intake in pregnancy. DESIGN AND SETTING Danish speaking pregnant women referred to the Midwife Centre in Aarhus, Denmark, for routine antenatal care were contacted at their first visit at approximately 15-16 weeks gestation from October to December 1998. The women were interviewed about current average alcohol ...

Subclinical levels of polysubstance use are a prevalent and understudied phenomenon. Alcohol is a substance commonly co-used with other substances of other drug classes. These studies sought to determine the consumption effects of combining alcohol drinking and methamphetamine (MA) self-administration. Male alcohol-preferring P rats had continuous access to a two-bottle alcohol drinking procedu...

Addiction to alcohol remains a major social and economic problem, in part because of the high motivation for alcohol that humans exhibit and the hazardous binge intake this promotes. Orexin-1-type receptors (OX1Rs) promote reward intake under conditions of strong drives for reward, including excessive alcohol intake. While systemic modulation of OX1Rs can alter alcohol drinking, the brain regio...

BACKGROUND Alcohol is a well-established risk factor for breast cancer, but pathways involved in alcohol-related breast carcinogenesis are not clearly defined. We examined the association between low-to-moderate alcohol intake and breast cancer subtypes by tumor hormone receptor status. MATERIALS AND METHODS A hospital-based case-control study was performed in 585 cases and 1,170 controls. In...

BACKGROUND Excessive alcohol consumption is associated with cardiomyopathy, but the influence of moderate alcohol use on cardiac structure and function is largely unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied 4466 participants from visit 5 of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study (76±5 years and 60% women) who underwent transthoracic echocardiography, excluding former drinkers and th...

It is common to treat some diseases with more than one medication simultaneously. Since more than one neurotransmitter system is involved in alcohol-seeking behaviour, then a therapeutic approach that targets more than one system should be more effective in reducing alcohol intake than one addressing a single system. To test this hypothesis, we compared the efficacy of low doses of individual d...

Alcohol dependence is a heterogeneous disorder where several signalling systems play important roles. Recent studies implicate that the gut-brain hormone ghrelin, an orexigenic peptide, is a potential mediator of alcohol related behaviours. Ghrelin increases whereas a ghrelin receptor (GHS-R1A) antagonist decreases alcohol consumption as well as operant self-administration of alcohol in rodents...

BACKGROUND Although alcohol consumption is commonly encountered in clinical practice, few studies have investigated the clinical significance of alcohol intake on the use of the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level. OBJECTIVES This study was performed to investigate the association between alcohol intake and HbA1c level in the general population. METHODS Among the 24,594 participants who participat...

background: alcohol is a potent teratogen and alcohol use in pregnancy and the periconception period can cause many complications in mother, fetus and neonate.  discussion: alcohol in the mother's blood passes through the placenta to the baby through the umbilical cord. drinking alcohol during pregnancy can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, and a range of lifelong disorders. alcohol-related birth ...

INTRODUCTION Shift workers-e.g., health care professionals, truck drivers, and factory workers-are forced to maintain daily cycles at odds with their natural circadian rhythms and as a consequence need to frequently readjust these cycles. This shift work-induced circadian desynchrony (CD) is associated with increased sleep disorders and with alcohol abuse. Nonetheless, it has proven difficult t...