Drinking to extreme excess, even once, can have devastating effects on a person’s body.
“Alcohol becomes like an anesthetic agent,” said Dr. Siva Yechoor, a psychiatrist and the medical director for the Lucas County Mental Health and Recovery Services Board.
The Blade spoke to Dr. Yechoor on Monday about the effects of extreme alcohol intoxication following the death of a Bowling Green State University student in an alleged hazing incident. An attorney for the family said 20-year-old Stone Foltz consumed “copious amounts of alcohol” at a Pi Kappa Alpha event.
The specific circumstances surrounding Mr. Foltz’s death have not been released, so it is not confirmed whether his passing was directly caused by acute intoxication.
Alcohol depresses the central nervous system, Dr. Yechoor said, by interfering with electrical signals in the brain. It’s why intoxication causes decreased motor function. More alcohol means more interference, which can affect a body’s essential life functions like breathing and heart rate. In the most serious cases, extreme intoxication can cause a person to go into a coma and die.
Dr. Yechoor said a general rule of thumb is that people with a blood-alcohol concentration of .2 to .3 percent should be monitored by medical professionals.
“This person is [in a potentially dangerous state] and really needs to be observed in a hospital setting,” he said. “They really need a whole lot of medical attention.”
A wide variety of individual factors affect intoxication, including body mass index, health conditions, and medications, as well as the potency of the alcohol and the rate at which a person consumes it. But regardless, a person’s liver can process only about .015 percent per hour.
“Alcohol, however much the concentration is in your system, it can only be detoxified or metabolized at a constant rate,” Dr. Yechoor said. “It can’t ever exceed that.”
Binge drinking is most common among young adults age 18 to 34, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is also an age at which people tend to experiment with a wide variety of things, Dr. Yechoor said.
He said society has become complacent and accepting when it comes to alcohol use.
“There’s a certain sense of glorifying it for the wrong reasons,” Dr. Yechoor said. “That glorifying of the culture needs to change. We need more education, and it really needs to be shown [as a serious health issue] like what we did with cigarettes.”
First Published March 9, 2021, 12:16 a.m.
