Alcohol and Older Adults: What You Should Know About Drinking As You Age

With nearly 9 in 10 adults aged 65 or older taking daily medication and more than 4 in 10 taking 5 or more medications per day, it’s important to consider how those medications may interact with alcohol. For many adult Americans, a nightcap is a welcome ritual at the end of the workday. And, as it turns out, it’s a habit that many continue long past retirement. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Heavy Drinking, nearly 39% of adults aged 65 or older report consuming 1-2 drinks per day while 16% report drinking 2 or more drinks a day. Ria’s telemedicine-based program is designed to simplify things, allowing you to access the support you need from the comfort of home. We use evidence-based methods to help you moderate or stop drinking, and our convenient smartphone app makes the whole process portable.

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This is why oftentimes when someone is drunk they get bloodshot eyes. Over time, continual bloodshot eyes due to excessive alcohol use can lead to the depletion of nutrients. This can also lead to impaired eyesight and the need for glasses, contacts, or surgery to correct your vision. Overall, the investigators found positive associations between cumulative consumption of liquor and total alcohol with GrimAge acceleration, as well as the number of days of binge drinking with GrimAge acceleration. You have to be old enough to drink it legally, and once you are, it can age you faster than normal.

• It also can impact judgment, reaction time, and driving ability.
• Studies show that heavy drinkers can have a harder time with things like osteoporosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, ulcers, cancer, memory loss, and certain mood disorders.
• Alcohol can affect the way some vital organs work and make them age faster.
• Mules, Manhattans, margaritas, martinis — my beer-or-wine routine was pleasantly upended.

Why Age and Alcohol Don’t Mix

Consuming certain types of alcohol over long periods of time as well as binge drinking both speed up biological aging, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in the journal Aging. Research examining the impact of alcohol consumption over a long period of time, as well as binge drinking, on biological aging has been limited. People older than 65 who don’t take any medications should average no more than one drink a day (seven per week) and have no more than three at one sitting.

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• It’s safe to say that people in England enjoying having a drink, with almost half (48%) having a tipple at least once a week.
• By adding extra stress to your body and depriving it of the nutrients it needs to rebuild, alcohol can place you years ahead in the aging process, and affect how you look.
• White matter lies under the brain’s gray matter and is the network of nerve fibers that transmit information throughout the brain.
• Regular alcohol consumption is a major risk factor for liver disease and head and neck cancer, and chronic alcohol use has been linked with an acceleration of age-related cognitive decline and brain atrophy.
• According to the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, administered by the U.S. federal government, about 20% of adults 60 to 64 and about 10% of those 65 and older say they binge drink.
• Popular methods such as meditation, yoga, therapy, and exercise may help if you drink to manage mental health conditions.

Older adults with mental health conditions such as depression, dementia, cognitive impairments, or anxiety are at a greater risk for developing problems with alcohol. Alcohol abuse can then worsen the symptoms of those conditions. Another interesting finding in Hou’s work was the influence of the type of alcohol. The results showed that people who drank liquor, as opposed to beer or wine, were at greater risk of ageing faster. And we’re not just talking about age in the ‘amount of candles of your birthday cake’ sense, either. Unlike chronological age, which counts the years we’ve lived, biological age assesses the function and disease risk at the cellular level.

Those are partly from dehydration, a common condition among older people, sober or not. (Our sense of thirst, funnily enough, is dulled with age.) Alcohol pulls water from your body, hence my cotton mouth and headache. Our 20-something daughter fled New York and moved back home, bringing Brooklyn cocktail culture with her. Mules, Manhattans, margaritas, martinis — my beer-or-wine routine was pleasantly upended.

Can biological age be reversed?

It’s a natural process called intrinsic aging, and it’s something you can’t control. Extrinsic aging is when your skin ages faster than it should because of your environment and how you live. That’s where alcohol comes in — it dehydrates you and dries out your skin. When you drink, try to have a meal or snack before having a cocktail or have a glass of wine with a meal, which will slow absorption of alcohol, Weaver says.

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As we age, our bodies metabolize alcohol differently than when we were younger, so our drinking habits need to change. The increased sensitivity to alcohol as we age can be more dangerous when combined with worsening vision and balance, increased medication use, and the types of medications we take as we age. I ask Koob if just drinking more water would dilute the alcohol in my system.

If you or someone you know is suffering from an addiction to alcohol or any other substance, contact us today. We want to help you get on the road to recovery so that you can live a happy, healthy, and sober life. Several previous studies have found non-linear changes in molecular abundances that can be linked to aging in rats and humans. Studies of fruit flies, mice, and zebrafish have also pointed to a stepwise aging process in those species.

There is a point though at which a person’s alcohol tolerance will actually begin to go down. This can be the direct result of changes to the composition of the body and hormonal changes. This is why you may notice that the older you get, the more prone you may become to hangovers the next day. These findings may help people make lifestyle changes to promote healthy aging. The mid-40s peak showed changes in molecules related to the metabolism of lipids, caffeine, and alcohol, as well as cardiovascular disease, and dysfunctions in skin and muscle. Most medications and alcohol don’t interact well with each other.

• At age 61, body water decreases in both sexes—to 57 percent in men and 50 percent in women.
• Chronic alcohol use also can damage the brain and exacerbate the effects of certain diseases.
• “Our results highlight the negative impact of excessive alcohol consumption, such as binge drinking, on biological aging,” Nannini said.
• The effect alcohol can have on breathing in older adults taking opioids is stark.
• Koob estimates there are 200 medical conditions that are worsened by alcohol, including the obvious, such as liver disease, as well as some not so obvious, like cancers, especially oral cancers.
• We want to help you get on the road to recovery so that you can live a happy, healthy, and sober life.

Signs You’re Aging Faster Than You Need to Be

You may have noticed as you get older, you’re more sensitive to alcohol—you may feel intoxicated faster and with less alcohol, or have worse hangovers, or just respond differently to alcohol than you did alcohol makes you age faster in the past. As for what’s behind the changing physical response to alcohol, Andrades cites a couple of key factors, including decreased muscle mass (replaced by fat tissue) and reduced liver function. During the early days of the pandemic, 14 percent of older adults reported drinking more, according to a national survey by University of Michigan researchers.