Alcohol & COPD: Does Alcohol Affect COPD? Interactions and Side Effects

While alcohol isn’t exactly healthy for anyone, the question of whether it’s bad for your lungs or particularly dangerous for COPD isn’t a simple question to answer. That’s why, in this article, we’re going to help you better understand the risks of alcohol and how it affects people with COPD. In fact, people who have an alcohol use disorder are more than twice as likely to have something called acute respiratory distress syndrome. And studies show that high levels of alcohol use may increase your risk for pneumonia, one of the main concerns people with COPD have. Those kinds of studies aren’t the ones doctors use to make medical decisions. If you’re living with COPD, you may have already made some lifestyle changes to stay healthy and make it less likely that your condition will get worse, which is great.

This could make it harder to breathe and increase a person’s risk of COPD. Heavy alcohol use can suppress, inhibit, or deplete a variety of essential nutrients, electrolytes, and antioxidants that your body needs to stay healthy. A deficiency in this antioxidant, which can happen if you drink heavily, can increase your risk for lung damage, exacerbations, and worsened COPD symptoms.

Alcohol-Related Deaths in COPD

If you’ve quit drinking or smoking, let your doctor know how long ago you quit and how much you used to drink or smoke in the past. One-third of adults with chronic health problems, including COPD, reported that they drink regularly. The relationship between drinking alcohol and smoking is well established. Heavy alcohol use can also cause deficiencies in important vitamins, especially vitamin B, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and folic acid. Additionally, alcohol contains a large number of calories, which can lead heavy drinkers to eat fewer nutritious foods or to become overweight. You should always consider what medications you are taking before you choose to drink.

Treatments for COPD patients affected by alcohol

Over a long period of time, heavy alcohol use can cause permanent damage to the kidneys, including kidney enlargement and dysfunction in the balance of hormones that regulate kidney function. Small amounts of alcohol are not enough to cause any permanent damage to your liver, but when you drink too much at once, the liver gets overloaded with metabolites and becomes inflamed. Over time, this inflammation can lead to permanent scarring in the liver and fatty liver disease. In fact, alcohol is responsible for more than a third of cases of liver disease that end in death.

Alcohol Acts as a Respiratory Depressant

It’s a good idea to talk to your doctor about your specific COPD medications to make sure drinking alcohol won’t cause an interaction or unwanted side effects. If you do drink, you should take special care of yourself to minimize any negative effects that alcohol might have on your lungs or your COPD symptoms. Drink only in moderation, eat a healthy diet, and drink extra water to prevent thickened mucus and dehydration. On a slightly different note, alcohol can also affect your lungs by making them more sensitive to cigarette smoke. It reduces the levels of an enzyme that helps protect your lungs from damage and inflammation caused by smoking. To help you better understand the risk, the following sections will explain in more detail how alcohol can affect your lungs, nutrition, and even interfere with COPD treatments.

• And you might wonder if alcohol could prevent, improve, or make COPD worse.
• These are all signs of alcohol intolerance, which can potentially make your COPD symptoms worse.
• If a person has COPD or is at risk for the disease, they should consider staying away from alcohol.
• Tabak, Cora, et al. “Alcohol consumption in relation to 20-year COPD mortality and pulmonary function in middle-aged men from three european countries.” Epidemiology, March 2001.
• Patients with severe COPD symptoms who don’t respond to treatment may need surgery to improve their breathing.

Risks of Alcohol Use

It can also lead to withdrawal symptoms like sweating, restlessness, irritability, nausea, tremors, hallucinations, and convulsions. Drinking alcohol can make you more likely to get a respiratory infection. Alcohol-related dehydration can also make it difficult to sleep, because it causes extra, thick mucus to build up in your airways. This mucus can obstruct does alcohol affect copd your airways at night, causing you to cough and making it difficult to breathe while you sleep. Alcohol also has a direct effect on the cilia in your airways, which work continually to keep too much mucus from building up in your lungs and airways. Cilia are finger-like protrusions that from a carpet lining the surface of your airways.

Heavy smokers are much more likely to be alcohol dependent, Schachter says. That’s why if you’re a smoker, doctors recommend you stop smoking right away. All participants provided written informed consent to participate in the study.

Heavy alcohol consumption, however, can cause a variety of symptoms and health complications over the course of many years. You have a higher risk of experiencing these negative effects the more heavily you drink and the longer the period of time that you drink for. The answer to whether we can drink alcohol with COPD isn’t necessarily clear. While the occasional alcoholic beverage may be safe, heavy drinking can make COPD symptoms worse and impair the health of our lungs. Researchers have yet to establish a direct link between COPD and alcohol.

The likelihood that you’ll have a flare-up is worse if you drink and smoke cigarettes. This can trigger sleep apnea or worsen pre-existing sleep apnea symptoms, which can make it difficult for your body to get enough oxygen while you sleep. This can cause hypoxemia (low blood oxygen levels) which, over time, can lead to a variety of severe and life-threatening health complications in people with COPD.

And there are other medications you might be taking, like antihistamines or antianxiety medications, that make you sleepy. Alcohol will only add to that, making you even more drowsy, and that could make it harder for you to breathe. If your respiratory system is damaged and you’re taking medication that could affect your ability to breathe, Han says adding alcohol could raise your risk for other problems. It’s not like someone is telling people to drink or not drink, says MeiLan K. Han, MD, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Health System. The kind of study she’s referring to, called a randomized, controlled trial, is much better at showing whether one particular thing — in this case, alcohol — can have a good or bad effect on your health. Those are the kind of studies experts use to approve medications and make treatment recommendations.

• In the short term, it causes a build-up of digestive enzymes in the pancreas, which can lead to acute inflammation known as pancreatitis.
• JHS contributed to interpretation of the data, revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content, and approved the final version.
• Drink only in moderation, eat a healthy diet, and drink extra water to prevent thickened mucus and dehydration.

Each participating institution’s institutional review board approved the protocol. You’ll meet millions of fellow Reframers in our 24/7 Forum chat and daily Zoom check-in meetings. Receive encouragement from people worldwide who know exactly what you’re going through! You’ll also have the opportunity to connect with our licensed Reframe coaches for more personalized guidance. Reward yourself for every success, and hold yourself accountable for every setback.

Does drinking alcohol worsen COPD symptoms?

According to some researchers, heavy drinking reduces your levels of glutathione. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a group of conditions that make it hard for air to pass through the lungs. COPD includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, and is the third leading cause of death in the United States. We publish material that is researched, cited, edited and reviewed by licensed medical professionals. The information we provide is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It should not be used in place of the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider.

But, despite drifting off more quickly, alcohol actually reduces the overall quality of sleep and causes frequent disruptions. Research shows that heavy drinking can elevate the risk of sleep apnea — a common breathing disorder — by about 25%. This can be particularly dangerous for people with COPD who already have oxygen levels that are lower than normal. Research shows that drinking alcohol may have negative effects on a person’s lungs and immune response.

In the most severe cases, long-term, excessive alcohol consumption can even lead to stroke, cardiomyopathy, or sudden cardiac death. The feeling of intoxication you get when you drink enough alcohol to get drunk comes mainly from alcohol’s effects on the brain. But it also affects your brain in other ways; in the short term, alcohol affects the brain’s ability to control your mood, your memory, and your impulse control.