If you are an alcoholic, the odds of walking out of a hospital alive aren’t half as good as a normal person’s. A new study recently published online in the journal European Psychiatry not only found that one in five alcoholics who checked into a hospital died during their stay (compared to only one and 12 non-alcoholics), but also that alcoholics were likely to be eight years younger than the other group when they died. According to a study published earlier this year in the Journal Addiction, nearly 80,000 people die as a result of drinking in the North and South America alone, with 84% of those being men. The shocking findings of both of these studies signify a red flag in how we are dealing with, diagnosing and treating alcoholism, which is clearly as grave of an illness as ever.