Alcohol can help save lives

Alcohol may actually provide some life-saving benefits to drinkers who get themselves into car crashes and other serious accidents, new research out of Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre shows.

But that's no licence to drink and drive, warn researchers, whose study was published yesterday in the journal Archives of Surgery.

The study shows that people with low to moderate amounts of alcohol in their systems may be less likely to die after arriving in hospital with serious head injuries than those who have not been drinking.

"Low concentrations of alcohol may have the ability to reduce secondary brain injury and may therefore improve brain-injury survival," Sunnybrook trauma surgeon Dr. Homer Tien, who led the study, said in a news release.

"However, the study only describes the effect of alcohol on the brain after injury occurs, and I'd like to stress that alcohol remains the leading cause of preventable trauma deaths and dramatically increases the likelihood of injury and fatal injury."

About a third to a half of all patients hospitalized from trauma are intoxicated at the time of their injury, the report says.

Paradoxically, however, the same alcohol responsible for the trauma might offer some significant brain protection in the aftermath of injury, Tien said.

Of the 1,158 people suffering severe head trauma who entered the hospital's trauma unit between 1988 and 2003, only 27.9 per cent with low to moderate blood-alcohol concentrations died of their injuries.

Meanwhile, 36.3 per cent of those who entered the sophisticated unit with no alcohol in their system succumbed to their trauma.

After adjusting for other factors, including type and severity of injury and whether blood transfusions were used, the study found that patients with low to moderate alcohol levels were 24 per cent less likely to die in hospital than those who had not been drinking.

But the same, post-accident drinking benefit did not extend to those with massive amounts of alcohol in their systems, the study found.

Patients with high blood-alcohol concentrations were 73 per cent likelier to die than those who had not been drinking.

In all, 403 of the patients suffering from severe "blunt force" head trauma died in the hospital of their injuries.

The study made no determination of the cause of this alcohol effect. But researchers speculated that moderate amounts of alcohol may help cut brain-cell loss from post-accident oxygen starvation that can compound the initial injury.

The study looked at three levels of alcohol concentrations: none, less than 230 milligrams of alcohol per decilitre of blood, and more than 230 milligrams per decilitre.

(The last blood reading translates into a roadside breathalyzer reading of 0.23 per cent – nearly three times the common legal limit of 0.08 per cent.)

The study stresses, however, that it should not be taken as good news for people who might consider drinking and driving – or other treacherous alcohol-related behaviours.

"There are major sociologic implications from implying that intoxicated patients with severe traumatic brain injury have better outcomes than non-intoxicated patients," the study says.

"We stress that our study only examined the role of alcohol on outcome in the post-injury phase because we examined only in-hospital deaths."