People in the United States are drinking a crazy amount of alcohol, and that has major health ramifications for the country, an astonishing new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims. Moderate alcohol consumption of one or two drinks a day can be helpful for your brain, but binge drinking can have a totally opposite effect, and that’s bad because many Americans fall in this category.

The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that Americans drank 17.5 billion binge drinks just in 2015, which is defined as having four or more drinks at once if you’re a woman, and five or more if you’re a guy. It has resulted in more than 44,000 deaths nationwide.

It is a concerning finding because binge drinking has acute long term effects, like violence, unintentional injuries, suicide, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer, and liver disease, to name a few problems.

“This study shows that binge drinkers are consuming a huge number of drinks per year, greatly increasing their chances of harming themselves and others,” said study co-author Robert Brewer, M.D., M.S.P.H., lead researcher in CDC’s alcohol program. “The findings also show the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to prevent binge drinking, focusing on reducing both the number of times people binge drink and the amount they drink when they binge.”