Increasingly, alcohol-related liver disease is killing younger people in the U.S.Johnson is part of a disturbing trend of 25-to-34-year-old men and women experiencing severe, and sometimes fatal, liver damage related to their drinking.Another reason could be that drinks have become more potent and people are "drinking more per unit volume," Dr. Elliot Tapper, a liver disease expert and gastroenterology specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, told NBC News.A liver damaged by excessive drinking can be treated, but it won't save a patient's life if alcohol is still in the picture.“We showed that health care utilization, how much [patients] got admitted to the hospital, how much they use the emergency room, all decreased” between the six months before the patients came to the program and the six months after, says Dr. Scott Winder, a program psychiatrist and an associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School.Just telling patients they have serious liver disease and will die if they don’t stop drinking is not good enough, said Dr. Henry Kranzler, Benjamin Rush Professor of Psychiatry and director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine."