Dark and stormy? It’s cocktail season

Now that our days are getting colder and shorter, a new study from the University of Pittsburgh gives us reason to think about the odd relationship between alcohol and weather.

It found that throughout the world, drinking levels and liver disease correlated with climate and sunlight.

Drinking and disease rose as average temperatures and hours of sunlight fell.

Ramon Bataller, senior author and chief of hepatology at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said people in colder climates may drink more because alcohol tends to make them feel warmer.

On the other hand, people in hot places are more likely to feel uncomfortable or light-headed when they drink.

For many people, darkness can also exacerbate depression, which is associated with drinking, though alcohol is a depressant.

Snowy climates might also increase isolation, which can make depression worse.

While people in frigid places like Russia are known for heavy drinking, Bataller said the connection between drinking and climate had not been studied systematically before.

Ateam led by Meritxell Ventura-Cots, a post-doctoral researcher at the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center, used large public data sets to compare average temperature and sunlight hours with average alcohol consumption per person, binge drinking and the percentage of drinkers in a population.

They also looked at cirrhosis caused by heavy drinking.

The patterns they found held up even when the team controlled for religious restrictions on alcohol use. Ventura-Cots said the study found that in Europe, people in Ukraine drank 13.9 litres of alcohol per capita per year while warmer Italians drank 6.7 litres per capita.

The study was published in the journal Hepatology.