Buy backpacks, exercise machines, athletic shoes, and more at Fogdog Sports. Prevention Definition Alcoholism is the popular term for two disorders, alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. The hallmarks of both of these disorders involve repeated life problems that can be directly tied to a person's use of alcohol. Alcoholism has serious consequences, affecting an individual's health and personal life, as well as having an impact on society at large. The effects of alcoholism are quite far-reaching.
Alcohol affects every body system, causing a wide range of health problems.
On a personal level, alcohol can be responsible for marital and other relationship difficulties, depression, unemployment, child abuse , and general family dysfunction. There are probably a number of factors that work together to cause a person to become an alcoholic. Recent genetic studies have demonstrated that close relatives of an alcoholic are four times more likely to become alcoholics themselves. Furthermore, this risk holds true even for children who were adopted away from their biological families at birth and raised in a non-alcoholic adoptive family, with no knowledge of their biological family's difficulties with alcohol. More research is being done to determine if genetic factors could account for differences in alcohol metabolism that may increase the risk of an individual becoming an alcoholic.