Ballpark figures will do, but, generally speaking, how much alcohol does a person have to be consuming (and for how long a time) for delirium tremens to be an issue (should the person quit cold turkey?)
Withdrawal delirium (aka DTs) occurs in about 1-4% of patients having alcohol withdrawal. It really doesn’t correlate well with the amount they drank; they drank enough to have alcohol withdrawal and hence ran a risk of DTs.
Historically, if DTs developed, mortality rates were as high as 20%. Now with proper medication, they’re less than 4%.
If you want to avoid DTs, don’t drink enough to have alcohol withdrawal.
Hope that helps.
ETA: or are you asking about how much drinking it takes to have alcohol withdrawal?
yes, this is what I’m asking about - since I’m assuming the social-drinker type doesn’t get DT and it’s the heavy alcoholics who do.
The problem with this is who says what a social drinker is? Many “heavy alcoholics” can be quite social when they drink and are not falling down drunk. In fact they have such a high tolerance that many times they just drink to stay “normal”. Same with any other addiction, just because you are not on skid row or showing outward signs of major addiction doesn’t mean you you are not majorly addicted.
That’s a hard question to answer. Though a score of 4 or more on this test was 91 percent sensitive and 89.7 percent specific for the development of alcohol withdrawal. Take the test and see your score!
Though for most of those folks, the withdrawal is mild. But about 20% will have severe symptoms, and about 1-4% will have DTs, as I earlier noted.
That quiz is kind of confusing because people who binge drink occasionally will score high on it.
When I used to binge drink once a week I scored a 9 just on the first three questions (I got a 0 on almost every other question though and got a total score of 10). But I never had withdraw symptoms as I’d only do it once a week.
Is there a number of times a week you have to drink before you have withdraw symptoms? I believe with drugs like Xanax, once a week dosing doesn’t cause as much withdraw issues, but when you dose 3 or more times a week it becomes a real problem. I don’t know if there’s a cutoff where if you aren’t going at least 72 hours between doses of a cns depressant your rates of withdraw go up.
My uncle was a functional alcoholic. I don’t know how much he drank on any given day, but he drank daily. Eventually he went into a nursing home, where he immediately had DTs. They were so severe and so persistent his doctor finally prescribed one shot of ethyl alcohol per day to calm them, which he drank for the rest of his life.
Before my uncle retired he was a Lt. Commander in the Navy and later an aircraft inspector for the FAA. I don’t know when daily drinking tipped into alcoholism, but :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Or as high as 35%, or as high as 5%, or as high as 15%… Partly because, even now, there seems to be no strict diagnostic criteria for DT’s. Partly because, then as now, people who get DT’s often have a lot of other medical problems.
If you take a modern medical meaning – including tachycardia, hypertension, hyperthermia and diaphoresis – then untreated mortality rate would be high. If you take a very non-medical meaning of DT’s – hallucinations – then mortality rate was always low. If you specifically mean delirium, you get an in-between number.
OP: different people respond to alcohol differently. There is a strong genetic component. And there is a suggestion that people respond differently after repeated withdrawal episodes: it’s difficult to differentiate this from the effect of repeated exposure. Plus it’s notoriously difficult to get accurate consumption estimates from alcoholics. There were experiments done on other animals (dogs, pigs), which might have given an indication for those animals, but I’ve never read any of them anyway.
You see suggestions (as referenced above), about how much alcohol intake might indicate dependance, but I’ve not see anything specifically predictive of delirium in that group other than prior episodes.
While not rigidly defined, a social drinker is normally regarded as someone who only drinks occasionally and/or in moderation. I think it would be a huge stretch to call drinking enough to build up a tolerance “moderation”.
Really? Because even 2-3 drinks a week is enough to build a small tolerance to alcohol. Or did you mean “physical dependence” rather than “tolerance?”
But we’re talking about a high tolerance. Enough to be a heavy drinker without appearing intoxicated. Even if you could somehow build up a high tolerance from 2-3 drinks a week, you’d never know it, because you wouldn’t be drinking enough to find out.
My mother was a raging alcoholic. When she was hospitalized for lung cancer (which she soon died of) and was forced to go “cold Turkey” she had terrible DT’s and I don’t think it took that long.
her dt’s were so bad that they actually let her have wine or beer with her meals because it was too much trouble to try to detox her; she was dying of lung cancer and it was obvious she was going to die soon so they said, what the heck, and let her have some alcohol to stop the dt’s.
while that works, I’m surprised they didn’t just slip her benzos, those are pretty typical drugs for end of life care. That would have shut down the DTs better than alcohol, along with reducing anxiety.
Of course giving a dying patient a few drinks in that circumstance is no bad thing. My condolences on having to deal with such a situation.
In my city it would depend on which hospital you were in. The more technocratic hospitals would give you drugs, because they work better. The less technocratic hospitals would give you low-alcohol beer, because it’s what you want, and restricted drugs are such a pain in the ass to deal with.
That quiz isn’t to determine if you’re going to have withdrawal symptoms, it’s to determine if your level of alcohol is “hazardous or harmful,” and binge drinking once a week clearly falls into that category.
I know many recovering alcoholics, and not very many had the DTs when they quit, even those who were drinking quite a bit. More would get the shakes. I do know a few who had the DTs and required medication.
I thought DT is “the shakes”. Are you saying there’s a difference?
Big difference: Delirium tremens - Wikipedia.
Did you read your own cite? Specifically, the two parts (in both the lede and the society/culture section) where it states that the two terms are synonymous?
“The shakes” is NOT a medical term, and means different things to different people. DTs means withdrawal delirium. Delirium is a medical term meaning there is a disturbance in attention (reduced ability to direct, focus, sustain, and shift attention) and cognition (memory deficit, disorientation, language, visuospatial ability, or perception).
“The shakes” may just mean tremors, or tremors combined with drowsiness, or inattention, etc. There’s no one definition for it (not in the medical lexicon, anyway).
So no, they are not synonymous, no matter what wiki says.