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The Effect of Alcohol on the Heart

  • Chapter
Metabolic Aspects of Alcoholism

Abstract

Most of the early publications dealing with the effect of alcohol on the heart make little distinction between the action of ethanol and that of nutritional factors; however, the effect of alcohol in general on the heart was recognized as early as 1855 by Wood1, in 1861 by Friedreich2, and in 1873 by Walshe3. Walshe described a localized form of cirrhosis occurring in the myocardial wall and in the Trabeculae carneae in the absence of impaired coronary circulation. One of the most original papers in this field was that of Bollinger, who introduced the term ‘Munich beer heart’ in describing cardiac dilatation and hypertrophy secondary to chronic alcoholism4. The paper was presented Original work was sponsored by the United States Public Health Service #R01 AA 00304-02, The Margaret W. and Herbert Hoover, Jr. Foundation, The Kenneth and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and the Council for Tobacco Research, U.S.A., Inc. at a meeting of the Medical Society of Munich in February, 1884; in it, Bollinger mentioned that cardiac hypertrophy was more common in Munich than anywhere else, quoting statistics from the pathological laboratory of the University of Munich. Among 1000 autopsies he discovered 46 cases (4.6 %) of cardiac hypertrophy as a cause of death. Bollinger stated that this could only be explained by invoking the effect of habitual excess in beer drinking. He was foresighted enough to state that: ‘With excessive habitual use of beer, one has to take into account the direct effect of alcohol on the heart, and to a much lesser degree, a large volume of fluid ingested’. Most of those patients were in the age group 31–40 years, and most of these individuals were overweight. Bollinger determined that the amount of beer consumed per capita in Munich in 1882 was 432 l/y, whereas the overall beer consumption in Germany was ‘only’ 88 l per capita.

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  1. R. J. Bing
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  2. H. Tillmanns
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Section of Liver Disease, Nutrition and Alcoholism, Veterans Administration Hospital, New York, USA

    Charles S. Lieber (Chief, Professor of Medicine and Pathology) (Chief, Professor of Medicine and Pathology)

  2. Mount Sinai School of Medicine (CUNY), New York, USA

    Charles S. Lieber (Chief, Professor of Medicine and Pathology) (Chief, Professor of Medicine and Pathology)

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Bing, R.J., Tillmanns, H. (1977). The Effect of Alcohol on the Heart. In: Lieber, C.S. (eds) Metabolic Aspects of Alcoholism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6153-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6153-4_4

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