STOP IN DRINKING GIVES ALCOHOLICS FULL LIFE SPAN

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 1, 1992                   TAG: 9202010185
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Short
STOP IN DRINKING GIVES ALCOHOLICS FULL LIFE SPAN
Most alcoholics who sober up can beat the odds of an early death virtually completely, even after 15 or 20 years of hard drinking, researchers said Friday.
"We need to try to really hard to get alcoholics into treatment and to quit," said Dr. Igor Grant, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego.
"And alcoholics can be encouraged to never give up - that no matter how much drinking they've done they can make up some of it if they quit," he said.
His study of 199 male alcoholics ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s found that those who quit drinking reduced their death rate to as low as that of non-alcoholics over the next one to 11 years.
Ninety-eight of the alcoholics stayed sober the whole time they were followed. Their death rate during the study period was almost the same as that of men of the same age in the general population. But the 101 who relapsed died at five times that rate, the study found.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB