ABSTRACT
Background: Physical fatigue, or muscle fatigue, is the temporary physical inadequacy of a muscle to perform adequately and to sustain an intended power generation, occurred from the contraction of muscle against a load with a decrease in both force and speed of shortening. Growing at unprecedented rate, chronic alcoholism is hampering health and well-being of the individuals at small and social and economic loss at large. Even though its effects are seen on every system of the human body, only few studies were done in relation to its effects on skeletal muscles. Aim and Objectives: To find and compare the duration of onset of fatigue and work done in isotonically contracting skeletal muscle in alcoholic and nonalcoholic sedentary healthy subjects. Materials and Methods: A sample size of 100, age and sex-matched sedentary individuals are recruited for the study and are categorized into Group 1 (50 alcoholics) and the Group 2 (non-alcoholic). Duration of the fatigue and work done in isotonically contracting muscle was estimated by Mosso’s ergography and compared using student’s t test. Windostat version 9.2 software was used for all statistical analysis. Throughout the study, the statistical significance was set at P ? 0.05 using two-sided tests for all analysis. Results: The duration of fatigue was significantly lower in alcoholics than non-alcoholics (P ? 0.05). The mean duration of fatigue was 2.980 min in alcoholics and 4.210 min in non-alcoholics. The work done was significantly lower in alcoholics than non-alcoholics (P ? 0.05). The mean work done was 4.363 kgm in alcoholics and 5.913 kgm in non-alcoholics. Conclusion: The work done was significantly lower in alcoholics than non-alcoholics (P ? 0.05). Hence, chronic alcoholism causes early onset of fatigue in the skeletal muscles and also decreases the amount of work done.