Sarah Wakeman

I mean, so first, every person is different.

One blowout weekend, you probably would be fine.

Anyone would probably be fine.

The challenge is one blowout weekend then leads to like multiple blowout weekends.

And then over time, that can actually accelerate the damage to your liver.

as long as you haven't gotten to that scarring phase.

So once you get too far down that path, even if you were to stop drinking, your liver won't recover.

The hard thing is that we don't totally understand who and why that happened so young to.

So this is an active area investigation because there are people who've been drinking for 60 years and their livers don't show signs of scarring.

And then we're seeing these young people at 25 who come in and die in the hospital.

And so there are individual factors that you don't have any way of knowing that are going to impact your risk of developing

liver inflammation and scar tissue.

And so the safest way to prevent that is to not drink in these really high ways that we know are going to lead to harm.

The other way is to get medical care because often we do detect these things through blood tests and we can do ultrasounds.

And when we see those early phases, so what happens first is you actually get fat deposition in your liver.

That's the first step.

And then we see inflammation in fatty liver.

And if you don't stop the thing that's driving those changes, over time we see the development of what's called fibrosis, which is like scar tissue.

And then that scar tissue gets more and more advanced to the point that your liver stops functioning and you either die or you need a liver transplant.

Yeah.