Alcohol Use Disorder and The Heart |Biomedgrid

Background: Alcohol Use Disorder is related with heart morbidity. The aim of this review is to summarize effects of alcohol in the heart and to underline the relationship between alcohol consumption, drinking patterns and cardiovascular health. Methods: We searched the databases PubMed and GoogleScholar by using the keywords “alcohol”, “ethanol”, “disorder”, “heart”, “direct”, “indirect”, “effect”, “detrimental”, “beneficial”, alone or in combination. Results: Heart is affected by alcohol directly (protein synthesis-degradation dysregulation, increased oxidative stress, apoptosis, mitochondrial dysfunction, fibrosis of ECM) and indirectly (increased sympathetic nervous activity, renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system activation endothelial dysfunction, hypertension. Cardiovascular risk related to alcohol includes hypertension, metabolic syndrome, myocardial infarction, myocarditis, heart failure, arrhythmias, stroke. Drink pattern plays a key role in the phenotype of an alcohol-related disease.