section_path: Prognosis
section_name: Prognosis
paragraph_text: Prognosis
  
  Alcoholism often reduces a person's life expectancy by around ten years. The most common cause of death in alcoholics is from cardiovascular complications. There is a high rate of suicide in chronic alcoholics, which increases the longer a person drinks. Approximately 3–15% of alcoholics die by suicide, and research has found that over 50% of all suicides are associated with alcohol or drug dependence. This is believed to be due to alcohol causing physiological distortion of brain chemistry, as well as social isolation. Suicide is also common in adolescent alcohol abusers. Research in 2000 found that 25% of suicides in adolescents were related to alcohol abuse.
  
  Among those with alcohol dependence after one year, some met the criteria for low-risk drinking, even though only 26% of the group received any treatment, with the breakdown as follows: 25% were found to be still dependent, 27% were in partial remission (some symptoms persist), 12% asymptomatic drinkers (consumption increases chances of relapse) and 36% were fully recovered – made up of 18% low-risk drinkers plus 18% abstainers. In contrast, however, the results of a long-term (60-year) follow-up of two groups of alcoholic men indicated that "return to controlled drinking rarely persisted for much more than a decade without relapse or evolution into abstinence....return-to-controlled drinking, as reported in short-term studies, is often a mirage."