People’s hands may hold a vital clue to their drinking habits, researchers said this week.
In a new study, scientists said they’ve found a link between high rates of alcohol consumption and those who have long ring fingers relative to their pointer fingers.
They believe that hormones are the reason why, as previous evidence indicated that consumption is influenced by prenatal sex steroids, like testosterone and estrogen.
Hormones are believed to influence the ratio of the length of different fingers, which is also called a digit ratio. Previous research shows that the amount of testosterone and estrogen people are exposed to in their mothers’ wombs can influence which fingers are longer, and that higher testosterone exposure may be linked to longer ring fingers.
“It is known that alcohol-dependent patients have very long 4th digits relative to their 2nd digits, suggesting high testosterone relative to estrogen exposure before birth. As expected, the associations were stronger for men than women,” John Manning, a professor at UK’s Swansea University, said in a statement.
Manning was a co-author of the study published in the journal American Journal of Human Biology. Manning, who is an honorary research fellow in the school’s department of sport and exercise science, worked with colleagues from the Polish Medical University of Lodz.
The authors used a sample of students to reach these conclusions. Of their 258 participants, more than half were female.
Looking at weekly consumption, they found that, overall, men show higher alcohol consumption and related deaths from alcohol abuse than women.
The authors hope these conclusions will help to bring a better understanding of the various factors that form people’s drinking habits, from abstinence to occasional use to harmful dependence.
“Alcohol consumption is a major social and economic problem. Therefore, it is important to understand why alcohol use shows considerable differences across individuals,” said Manning.
Excessive alcohol use is a leading preventable cause of death in the United States. In the U.S., more people die from alcohol-related causes than opioids. Between 2019 and 2020, alcohol-related deaths increased by more than 25 percent.
Each year, there are more than 178,000 deaths attributable to excessive alcohol use. Of those, 120,000 are male deaths, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
A study published earlier this year found deaths tied to excessive alcohol use rose 29 percent in just five years.