Drinking Alcohol with Chronic Kidney Disease

However, the study authors also mentioned that more studies are needed to explore the connection between AUD and kidney function. When your liver isn’t functioning well, it can impair blood flow to your kidneys. “Liver disease can have significant impacts on the kidneys,” says Dr. Bobart. Alcohol can cause changes in the function of the kidneys and make them less able to filter your blood. In addition to filtering blood, your kidneys do many other important jobs.

This giving season, make 3X the impact for kidney patients

• Alcohol increases the acidity of urine and can irritate the lining of the bladder.
• Moreover, alcohol-induced renal tubular dysfunction is also reflected in vitamin reabsorption disorders.
• There’s a risk of liver disease, but not kidney damage if you drink moderate amounts of alcohol, says Goldfarb.

Chronic alcohol consumption can also lead to a deficiency in vitamin B1 (thiamine), potentially resulting in serious neurological disorders like Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, she adds. “Long-term heavy drinking may contribute to cognitive decline and increase the risk of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” adds Andrews. Our study showed that higher amounts of alcohol use can cause important predisposing comorbidities for CKD, including obesity, hypertension, or diabetes mellitus. The risk of ESKD was significantly higher according to higher genetically predicted amounts of alcohol use, and this association was not affected by whether alcohol use was within the recommended level or the amounts of alcohol-use phenotype. The MR results suggest a causal link between higher amounts of alcohol use and an increased risk of ESKD and that the use of alcohol may generally increase the risk of ESKD 1. As recent evidence has shown that there is no “safe” level of alcohol use 2, this may be a reasonable recommendation for people overall or individuals with CKD, not only regarding the risk of ESKD but also considering the risk of general mortality.

Considerations When Drinking Alcohol with Chronic Kidney Disease

However, as alcohol consumption can lead to adverse events, such as hypertension, cerebral hemorrhage, alcohol addiction, and tendencies toward violence, clinicians should not advise non-drinkers to start drinking. In summary, there is no exact evidence that alcohol consumption aggravates the state of CKD or increases all-cause mortality in CKD, and the protective effect of abstinence on such patients is unclear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that nearly two-thirds of American adults drink alcohol. A concerning portion—about 1 in 4 drinkers—binge drink at least once per year, consuming five or more drinks within a short time frame. Binge drinking can lead to acute kidney injury (AKI), a sudden drop in kidney function that can sometimes lead to lasting damage. Regular, heavy alcohol use can also be harmful to your kidneys over time.

Treatments for acute kidney injury

Although moderate alcohol consumption contributes to increased insulin sensitivity 95,96 and delays the progression of diabetes 77,97, the prognosis of such patients differs from non-diabetic but moderate drinking patients with CKD. This indicates that moderate drinking may be beneficial for patients with CKD, but it is not enough to offset the adverse effects of metabolic disease on these patients. In contrast, some studies find that heavy alcohol consumption may predict poorer outcome in patients with chronic kidney diseases (Kronborg et al. 2008; Shankar et al. 2006; White et al. 2009). For example, White and colleagues (2009) reported that heavier drinkers (those consuming more than 30 g of alcohol/week) were at higher risk of incident albuminuria, which is typically a symptom of kidney disease. Japanese (Yamagata et al. 2007) and Italian (Buja et al. 2011) cohort studies revealed a U-shaped association between alcohol consumption and incidence of proteinuria.

Several studies have demonstrated that alcohol consumption increases ROS generation, which contributes to lipid peroxidation and damages antioxidant capacity 34,35. Moreover, even if alcohol may help prevent kidney cancer, it can increase the risk of developing other cancers. In particular, studies have shown that does alcohol damage the kidneys alcohol can contribute to liver, breast, and colorectal cancers (28). Long-term alcohol use can have significant and lasting effects on the kidneys. One of the primary long-term effects is the development of alcohol-induced kidney disease (12).