There is a new “chapter” in the saga of alcohol-consumption health consequences.

Actually, the chapter itself is not new, but there’s a new recognition that hasn’t been front-and-center in a widespread way up to now.

Now that recognition is becoming more visible and, with that, more troubling.

Women and their spouses — or significant others — need to pay attention and, perhaps, have some heart-to-heart discussions about what’s at stake and what needs to be done to avert a tragic outcome.

No right-thinking person should consider the issue one to be pooh-poohed. Those who are willing to acknowledge the seriousness might, over the long run, spare themselves much pain, anxiety and medical procedures and treatments.

The issue in question, spoken clearly in the headline of an article in the May 15 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

“Women are drinking more, and doctors are worried.”

Here is a portion of one paragraph from that article:

“Doctors are now witnessing more hospitalizations of women for liver disease, and some researchers suspect alcohol consumption is contributing to rising rates of breast cancer. Women are also experiencing increasing alcohol-related deaths at a faster clip than men.”

According to the May 15 article, women seem to be drinking more for a number of reasons.

“They are more likely to attend college, where heavy alcohol consumption is a staple,” the article says. “They are earning more and have more discretionary income. And women are also getting married and having children later in life or not at all, extending their child-free social lives.”

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism notes that women’s alcohol-related health problems tend to start at lower levels of drinking compared with men.

“Women’s bodies tend to contain less water and more fat, resulting in a higher blood alcohol concentration than men, even when body weight and the amount consumed are equal,” the institute pointed out.

“U.S. women still drink less heavily than men overall and experience fewer related deaths, but that gap is shrinking here and across the globe,” the Journal reported.

Meanwhile, according to the journal Addiction, women in their 30s and 40s have increased their alcohol consumption in recent decades, as their lifestyles have changed.

“Women who turned 35 between 2018 and 2019 were nearly 60% more likely to report recent binge-drinking or alcohol use disorder symptoms than women who turned 35 between 1993 and 1997,” Addiction reported.

While keeping those numbers in mind, consider the viewpoint of some researchers who allege that the alcohol industry is marketing directly toward women, in an effort to bring in more women to its “roster” of customers — and, thus, bolster the industry’s financial bottom line.

Also, some researchers harbor the belief that the increase in women’s alcohol use is a potential contributor to a 1% rise each year in breast cancer rates, with greater increases for women under 50 years old.

The Journal noted that drinking alcohol can increase estrogen levels and, thus, the risk of breast cancer. The newspaper reported studies’ conclusions that one drink a day raises a woman’s breast cancer risk by about 10%.

That’s a big number, the accuracy of which every woman needs to judge for herself but which — unfortunately — many will choose just to ignore.