For as long as people have been drinking, people have been getting hurt, with alcohol playing a role in injuries from the most inconsequential to the most extreme. Few if any doctors would argue that excessive drinking is not an important public health threat.

But a new report suggests that sometimes things are more complicated than that. When it comes to serious head injuries, people who have drunk moderate amounts of alcohol seem to be at less risk of dying than people who are sober. The report appears in The Archives of Surgery, and its authors were at pains to say they were not endorsing heavy drinking, especially during the holiday season. Heaviest drinkers, anyway, were the most likely to die.

“Certainly, if you take all things equally, if you drink and drive you’re still much more likely to die from an accident,” said the lead author, Dr Homer CN Tien of the University of Toronto, in an interview.

The researchers nevertheless found clear evidence that in some cases, a certain amount of alcohol helps the brain recover from blunt trauma injury. And those findings, they said, could lead doctors to develop head injury treatments that involve alcohol preparations.

They did, however, point out that as many as half of all patients hospitalised with trauma were intoxicated when they were hurt. Alcohol is believed to play a role in about a third of all deaths from injury. And by impairing motor skills, reaction time and judgment, alcohol increases the risk of injury in almost every imaginable way, leading to car crashes, falls, assaults and self-inflicted wounds.

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