That is a question I can't answer.
I can tell you that in the past two weeks I've had two patients who came in for scheduled surgery who were heavy drinkers. Both had 3-4 drinks a day, but only one suffered from DT's.
Let's see what the internet can show us.
While doing a very brief and limited search to find out if there are any studies leading me to the stats I came across this article: "Alcoholics Risk Infection After Heart Surgery" and in it states that 20-30% of people in the hospital are alcoholics. It's interesting to note that the highest prevalence is detected in the third to fifth decade of life, and also that the risk of surgical complications due to alcohol increase with simply 60 grams of alcohol a day (3 glasses of beer or wine.)
This is also an interesting abstract on, "The Alcohol Patient and Surgery." Wow. I wonder how much money they are talking about when they say the economic implications are tremendous.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
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3 comments:
I'm so excited to look at your sites! We were struggling with a patient unexpectedly starting DT's last night and had a few discussions about how it is that people respond so differently to alcohol abuse and how some withdrawl so violently, yet the same ammount of alcohol, stopped abruptly in someone else may have no effect on them? We also do liver transplants on my floor and have a lot of patients receiving liver transplants after esld secondary to etoh abuse. That is always sad, yet leads to the same discussion when some of the patients are still in their 30's. It's crazy. I'm excited to check out the sites tonight at work!
Thank you Katie! I hope that with a couple articles under your belt you'll have a better understanding of what is going on and where to get more information.
Maybe it affects people differently because of the psychological side of addiction...? I don't know, I am no nurse or scientist of any kind... but it's just a thought.
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