Congenital Heart Defect: Alcohol

[gigglesbff]

With the congenital heart defect can you drink alcohol?

[skydnsr]

He was lucky that he even had the opportunity to go on the pump.  Most people don't get that chance.  

[ed34]

I met a guy in hospital that was wearing a bypass pump. His heart had swollen to much through alcohol that it could no longer pump properly. They switched his heart off and the pump on, in the hope his heart could recover over time. After 6 months his heart was just starting to go back to normal size again. He had 12 hours on the batteries at any time and had to keep plugging himself into the mains supply. The pump is obviously risky, but there was no alternative for him. I often wonder how well he recovered.

[skydnsr]

I basically agree with HesAPooka, but I'll give a little more detail.  The usual recommendation -- for people who are in good health and who have no heart problems -- is to limit alcohol intake to one drink per day for females and two drinks per day for males.  Males are expected to be able to handle more alcohol than females, because their livers usually produce higher amounts of alcohol dehydrogenase, which is the enzyme that detoxifies alcohol.  

You can't "save up" your weekly allowance of alcohol and have 7 drinks on a Saturday night.  It's considered unhealthy to drink more than an amount of alcohol that is equivalent to, say, a glass or two of wine with dinner, per day.  That's because your liver needs time to produce the enzymes needed to metabolize the alcohol.  If you drink too much, your liver can't keep up, and the alcohol builds up in your bloodstream.  Being drunk is literally a state of toxicity.  

Whether you can even drink the one or two drinks per day that most people can is something you should discuss with your cardiologist, because it depends on the details of your situation.  Some people with heart problems can't drink alcohol at all.  Alcohol in the blood is literally toxic to heart cells.  The more you drink at one time, the higher your blood alcohol concentration, and the greater the toxicity.  

People with healthy hearts are usually able to tolerate even the occasional excess intake of alcohol, because they have a few heart cells to spare, so to speak.  If you don't have any heart cells to spare, though, then you probably shouldn't drink alcohol at all.  Depending on how bad a shape your heart is in, drinking even a small amount of alcohol could be taking a chance on damaging it further.  This is true for people with acquired heart disease, as well as for people with congenital heart disease.

[updownleftright]

That would depend on the severity of the defect, but at the end of the day less or no alcohol is always better than more.