Alcohol can help save lives:
Alcohol may actually provide some life-saving benefits to drinkers who get themselves into car crashes and other serious accidents, new research out of Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre shows.
But that's no licence to drink and drive, warn researchers, whose study was published yesterday in the journal Archives of Surgery.
The study shows that people with low to moderate amounts of alcohol in their systems may be less likely to die after arriving in hospital with serious head injuries than those who have not been drinking.
"Low concentrations of alcohol may have the ability to reduce secondary brain injury and may therefore improve brain-injury survival," Sunnybrook trauma surgeon Dr. Homer Tien, who led the study, said in a news release.
"However, the study only describes the effect of alcohol on the brain after injury occurs, and I'd like to stress that alcohol remains the leading cause of preventable trauma deaths and dramatically increases the likelihood of injury and fatal injury."
About a third to a half of all patients hospitalized from trauma are intoxicated at the time of their injury, the report says.
Paradoxically, however, the same alcohol responsible for the trauma might offer some significant brain protection in the aftermath of injury, Tien said.
Proving once again the wisdom of Homer Simpson's toast: "To alcohol! The cause of and solution to all of life's problems."
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