Why Are Women More Susceptible to Liver Damage From Alcohol?

Why are women more susceptible to liver damage from alcohol? There are a few possible reasons- including a woman's size. Estrogen may also play a role.

It’s widely known that excessive consumption of alcohol over a sustained period of time can lead to serious damage to the liver. Alcoholic Liver Disease (ALD) is the specific name for the condition that develops in such a situation. ALD is an umbrella term that covers three more specific conditions: fatty liver, cirrhosis of the liver, and alcoholic hepatitis. All three are severe, potentially fatal, and caused by excessive use of alcohol.

In general, women develop ALD earlier in life and based on less total alcohol consumption than men. One distinct reason for this, of course, is the same reason why women reach intoxication sooner: they have

• Smaller bodies
• Greater fat content (which absorbs alcohol more quickly than other tissues)
• Total overall area for alcohol distribution throughout the body; thus, more of it will collect in the liver and do damage.

Estrogen

This is a partial answer to why women are more susceptible to liver damage from alcohol, but there may be other factors at play. Some studies have shown that estrogen, the female sex hormone, might play into the difference, although nobody is sure how such conditions would function.

Enzymes

The most significant finding thus far has been the fact that women tend to have less enzymes in their stomachs for breaking down alcohol. A specific enzyme in the stomach is meant to help break down alcohol before it reaches the liver, and most men have more of this enzyme than women do, meaning every time a woman drinks, more of the alcohol makes it through to her liver than would occur in a man drinking the equivalent amount.

Understanding Liver Damage from Alcohol

Medical researchers understand why alcohol damages the liver; it wasn’t until fairly recently, however, that they began to pinpoint why ALD occurs more in some people than in others. While there are a number of factors that contribute to this variation – ranging from heredity to plain old luck – it’s been a consistent fact that women are far more susceptible to ALD than men.

In order to understand the science behind this, it’s important to understand exactly how the liver works, and how it interacts with alcohol.

The liver is the largest organ in your body, and at any given time it is holding about 13% of your blood. The liver is set up to act as a filtration system. Blood from the stomach and intestines passes through the liver before traveling on to the rest of the body. The liver takes nutrition from food, aids in digestion, and removes toxins from the system.

Alcohol, of course, is considered a toxin. Too much of it and the liver may become clogged with fat, stop functioning properly, experience a chemical imbalance, or, in the case of cirrhosis, fill up with scar tissue and stop functioning altogether.

So, the basic answer to why women are more susceptible to liver damage than alcohol is simply that, for whatever reason, their bodies have more of an adverse reaction to the toxin of alcohol.