Apr 28, 2015 05:38 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

Just drinking one or two alcoholic drinks a day could significantly boost your risk for liver disease, according to a recent study.

According to the World Health Organization, excessive alcohol drinking is the most common cause of cirrhosis worldwide.

Many studies assessing the prevalence of alcohol abuse as a risk factor for alcoholic cirrhosis focus on total annual amount drunk per person.  But according to clinical studies, it is a high daily consumption which is the strongest predictor of alcoholic cirrhosis.

New data shows that the cirrhosis burden caused by alcohol increased by 11.13 percent when moving from the moderate to heavy daily drinking (up to one drink/day for women; two drinks/day for men) classification (p<.001).

Based on these findings, researchers concluded in their new study that heavy daily drinkers most significantly and independently influence a country's cirrhosis burden.

According to the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, About 6 percent of global deaths are caused by drinking alcohol, the majority from alcoholic cirrhosis -- scarring of the liver as a result of continuous, long-term liver damage. Half of all cases of cirrhosis are caused by alcohol.

For the study, researchers analyzed the WHO's Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, which included parameters of alcohol consumption and drinking patterns from 193 countries.

Researchers of the current study concluded that reducing heavy drinking should therefore be considered as an important target for public health monitoring and policies.

The findings were provided by the European Association for the Study of the Liver.

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