In a presentation at the Digestive Disease Week (DDW) virtual conference, Waihong Chung, MD, reported on a study he and colleagues conducted that revealed alcohol-related gastrointestinal (GI) and liver diseases rose by almost 60% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Chung is a research fellow with the division of gastroenterology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

“We were seeing fewer GI consults in general during the lockdown phase because our hospital was overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients,” said Dr Chung, who served as lead researcher. “But the proportion of consults of alcohol-related GI and liver diseases were significantly higher, both during the lockdown phase and the reopening phase.”

Data were collected and analyzed from consultations with all inpatient GI admits from three hospitals during two phases of the pandemic—between March 23 and May 10, 2020, totaling 558 patients: and from June 1 to July 19, 2020, totaling 713 patients. Data were compared to the same time period during 2019, and did not include nonadmitted individuals with alcohol-use disorders.

During the lockdown phase, the researchers found, most admissions for alcohol-related GI and liver diseases occurred during weeks 5,6, and 7, after the patients had been isolated at home and had started to drink more alcohol, Dr Chung reported.

Some noteworthy findings of Dr Chung’s team included: the volume of GI consults fell by 27% during lockdown; consults for alcohol-related GI and liver disease increased by almost 60%; once the volume of GI consults rebounded to 101% during reopening phases, alcohol-related GI and liver disease consults remained higher at 78.7%; and alcoholic hepatitis consults increased by 127% during the reopening phase.

Dr Chung cautioned that even these figures may be an underestimation of the numbers of people who began to drink alcohol more heavily during the past year. “Alcoholic liver disease and alcoholic GI disease have exploded as a result of the pandemic, but the problem is, patients are seldom going to volunteer this information,” he said.

“There are validated screening questions physicians can ask, such as the CAGE questionnaire that only take a minute to administer and offer reasonable sensitivity and specificity for alcohol use disorders. It’s an important problem, and if we do not screen for it, we cannot help these people.”

—Angelique Platas

Reference:
Chung W. Increased burden of alcohol-related gastrointestinal and liver diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic: a hospital system-wide audit. Presented at Digestive Disease Week, May 22, 2021. Virtual.