Turning Point Treatment Center: Deaths from liver disease are surging, and drinking is to blame

It doesn’t take many years of drinking to permanently damage the liver, doctors say.

Deaths from liver disease have risen sharply in the U.S., and doctors say the biggest factor is drinking —especially among young adults.

A study published Wednesday found a 65 percent increase in deaths from cirrhosis of the liver since 1999. The biggest increase is among millennials: the team found that deaths from cirrhosis are rising 10 percent a year among people aged 25 to 34.

People so young might not even realize that they can drink themselves to death so quickly, but they can, said liver specialist Dr. Haripriya Maddur of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

“So when people start drinking in college and they start binge drinking, that can actually lead to end-stage liver disease at a much earlier age,” Maddur told NBC News.

For the study, Dr. Elliot Tapper and Dr. Neehar Parikh at the University of Michigan and the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, looked at federal data taken from death certificates and the U.S. Census Bureau.

“From 1999 to 2016 in the U.S., annual deaths from cirrhosis increased by 65 percent, to 34,174, while annual deaths from hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) doubled to 11,073,” they wrote in their report, published in the British Medical Journal.

Earlier this week, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a 43 percent increase in death rates from liver cancer between 2000 and 2015. The increase made liver cancer the sixth-leading cause of cancer death in 2016, up from the ninth-leading cause in 2000.

Read the complete article here at NBCNews.com