While a drink now and then is unlikely to adversely impact your health, abusing alcohol can lead to long-lasting, even life-threatening damage.

Here are five ways that alcohol abuse can damage your body:

Brain: Long-term alcohol abuse can lead to the shrinking of your frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain that controls important cognitive skills in humans, such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, language and judgment.

Heart: Heavy drinking for long periods of time is one of the leading causes of many different types of heart disease.

Liver: Prolonged alcohol abuse can damage the liver, preventing it from properly cleaning out harmful substances from your body. This damage cannot be undone.

Behaviour: Over time, because of damage to the brain and body, alcohol can change your typical behaviours and abilities. This may leave you with difficulty walking, blurred vision, slurred speech, slowed reaction times, an impaired memory and poor clarity for making decisions.

Pancreas: Excessive alcohol consumption can cause chronic pancreatitis, which is an inflammation of the pancreas. This leads to pain, nausea, vomiting, and can come with life-threatening complications.