How Long Does Alcohol Stay in Your System?

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Talking about alcohol, some beverages fall into an alcoholic drink, such as beer, liquor, wine, etc. When we talk about alcohol, a question comes into everyone’s, i.e., “How long does alcohol stay in your system?“. Answering the question, while studying in detail the metabolism rate of alcohol, there are various factors such as age, sex, body, mass, overall health, and genetics.

Depending on these factors, alcohol stays in your system for 10 hours to 90 days. If a liver is healthy, it will stay in your system for an hour. Let’s say you have one drink at 5 ‘o clock in the evening, and alcohol will be clear by 6 ‘o’clock. But if you have another drink at 5:30 pm, keeping a span of 30 min, the time will be added to how long alcohol will stay in your system? by 8 pm, and you will be intoxicated.

How will Alcohol be Measured in Your Body?

The more one drinks, the more alcohol your stay in your system. The more you drink, the more blood alcohol concentration level¹ will increase. Alcohol or ethanol is broken down into acetic acid. About 5% of alcohol gets out from the system through sweat, urine, saliva, breath, and feces into carbon dioxide and water.

Through drug tests, it is easy to detect how long does alcohol stay in your system? The methods are here to detect the estimated time of how long does alcohol stay in your system.

How long alcohol can stay in your system

Breath

The concentration of alcohol is processed with the level of blood alcohol concentration, and it helps to test how long alcohol stays in your system? Alcohol can be detected in your breath through a test called breathalyzer test² for up to 24 hours.

Urine

These tests can detect alcohol in your urine within 12 hours and 24 hours. This length of time depends on how much you drank recently.

Hair

like many other tests or drug test, alcohol test can be detected from hair follicle drug test, which stays valid for 90 days.

Saliva

This test can occur positive to alcohol within 24 hours to 48 hours of the last drink. The time limit can be from 48 hours to 90 days.

Breast milk

Alcohol can be detected in breast milk for as long as it remains in the blood. As long as the alcohol leaves the body, it also leaves the breast milk.

False Positive

The test may occur false positive sometimes when you stay in the surrounding of alcohol or coming in contact with households product such as cosmetics, hand sanitizer, cooking extract, mouth wash, and hair dye. Medications such as cough syrup may also lead to false-positive test because it contains the residue of alcohol.

Factors of How Long Does Alcohol Stay in Your System?

A question must have arisen in everyone’s mind what are the factors of how long does alcohol stay in Your system. Two persons are not the same in terms of their behavior, attitude, body type, metabolic rate³, and working of organs differ from person to person. The factors that affect how long does alcohol stay in your system are described below:

1. Age plays a very significant role in how long does alcohol stays in your system. As you age, your organs get worn out, and it removes 90 percent of the alcohol from your system.

2. Medicines: if you are intaking any medicines and are intaking alcohol, it will act like an intoxicating substance for your body. While processing and removing the extract from your body, alcohol will remain in the body while the liver is processing the medications.

3. Strength of alcohol consumption by a body. It totally depends on which alcohol you are consuming. It may vary how long alcohol stays in your system. the harder the alcoholic drink, the longer time it will take to stay in your system organs need to work.

4. weight plays a major role in how long alcohol stays in your system. The more you weigh, the more blood alcohol level will increase in your system. However, the overweight you are, your blood’s alcohol level will not affect your system as alcohol is not fat-soluble⁴.

How to Get Away Alcohol From The System of The Body?

The body eliminates the alcohol at the average rate of 0.016 BAC per hour, regardless of how healthy your system is. There is a misconception that if you take a shower, do vomit, or even drinking coffee or water after several drinks of alcohol won’t affect the rate of eliminating alcohol from the system.

The time taken to eliminate from your body is directly related to how much you drink. The more and heavy you drink, the larger the time it will eliminate from your system.

Don’t Know The Standard Drink Measurements?

People usually underestimated the amount of alcohol when it comes to consuming alcohol, and the only reason is they don’t know the standard measurement of the alcohol. One glass of any drink is equal to one 12-oz beer, 1.5 ounces of liquor, 5-oz glass of wine,5 fl oz shot of distilled spirits (gin, rum, tequila, vodka, whiskey).

Here You can Identify When You are Drunk?

The blood alcohol concentration is higher, the higher your intoxicated with alcohol. When your drunk, here is some symptoms:

Confusion related to the surroundings, people, you lost your senses.
Slurred speech
Concentration difficulty.
Respiratory depression or breathing difficulty.
You have trouble remembering things.
nausea or vomiting
impaired balance and coordination

Not only these drunk people are more at risk apart from the impaired coordination⁵, concentration difficulty, but the more risk is also as follows:

Motor accidents
Suicide
violence
homicide
Risky or troublesome behaviors.

How Is Alcohol Processed in The Body?

The body directly uses about 20% of the alcohol or ethanol into the bloodstream through the stomach, and the rest 80% is absorbed in the small intestines. When the alcohol reaches the bloodstream, it enters the liver and gest processed and metabolized. The enzymes that are produces by the liver break down into alcohol molecules.

On drinking alcohol regularly, it will lead to a slower rate of metabolism, and the process of breaking down alcohol molecules becomes slower.

What are The Problems or Risks of The Long Term?

Alcoholism has been a most indelible part of the growing modern times, and with the growing trend, the studies also identify how long alcohol stays in your system.

Some change their food habits to stay fit and healthy throughout their life and drink occasionally. Some people have also started drinking heavily without even thinking and knowing its repercussions on their health and family.

Heavily alcoholism is linked with health issues such as:

Mouth Cancer
Breast Cancer
Stroke
heart diseases
Accident
Liver infection or liver failure
Nervous system diseases

One should keep track of how much and how frequently he is drinking alcohol.