10 Reasons Why Alcohol Is Worse For Your Health As You Age

Alcohol is a beverage that humans consume for fun. But, alcohol, which is already not good for you, actually gets worse for you as you age. However, most people don’t know exactly why the negative effects of alcohol on your health get worse with age. It boils down to a few major changes that occur in your body as you age. The two most significant changes that people encounter with alcohol as they age are that their metabolisms slow down and they likely take more prescribed and over-the-counter medications to combat the natural effects of aging on their health. These factors, among others, can influence why alcohol is worse for you as you age. Let’s examine the factors that change as you get older so you can enjoy alcohol safely.

To populate this list, we looked at reputable sources of health information, such as the National Institute of Health, and university studies from sources like Harvard. We looked at the health risks associated with alcohol use and the impacts of aging on those factors, sourcing peer-reviewed studies and medical journals to ensure that the information we had was the best in class at the time. We also sought to understand the underlying physiological mechanisms that influence how alcohol affects the body as people age. Editorial discretion was used in the selection of sources and studies. However, we aimed to only provide scholarly sources as this is a topic that can influence someone’s health outcomes through the choices they make. We aimed to avoid oversimplifying or fearmongering.

1. Your Metabolism Slows Down

Your metabolism is a measure of the processes your body is constantly undergoing for the maintenance of life. These processes include how quickly the body breaks down food and food-adjacent substances that you put in it for sustenance, or in the case of alcohol, just for fun. As you get older, your overall metabolism slows down from aging. The slowing of the metabolism is a normal process that all aging creatures undergo. As you get older, your body’s organs and other parts can no longer function at the same level they did when you were young. However, when it comes to alcohol, the slowing of the metabolism, specifically how quickly your body can break down and process alcohol, becomes pertinent.

As your metabolism slows and your body slows down the process of breaking down alcohol, the natural consequence is that alcohol stays in your system longer. Since your body is taking longer to break it down, it stays in your stomach and intestinal tract for longer. Thus, more alcohol enters your bloodstream. When you’re young, your body metabolizes alcohol more quickly. Once broken down the alcohol can no longer enter your bloodstream and cause intoxication. In older adults, the slowed metabolism causes the alcohol to stay in their body, entering their bloodstream for a longer period. Thus, when you get older, your functional blood alcohol level may go up even though you haven’t increased your intake. This increase in the blood alcohol level can be risky if you’re a heavy drinker, but even light drinkers will notice an increase in drunkenness as they get older due to it.

2. You Have Lower Total Body Water

The average percentage of your body that is made up of water is around 60%. However, that’s an average that doesn’t take into account factors like sex, gender, and age. The actual percentage of your body that’s made up of water varies from person to person, ranging from around 45% to as much as 75%. Your total body water goes down as you get older. This means that when you drink alcohol as you get older, the amount of alcohol you drink has increasing effects on your body. Due to the lower water content of your body, a higher content of your body becomes alcohol when you drink in old age. Thus, alcohol will have a stronger effect on an older person compared to a younger one.

Additionally, alcohol is a diuretic. That means it makes your body metabolize liquids into urine faster. This process removes water from your body faster, dehydrating you as you drink more. With a lower total body water, there’s less water in your body to remove. Thus, older people who drink may start to feel sick from dehydration sooner than young people. Their bodies are removing water faster than they are likely consuming it, especially if they’re currently drinking alcohol. The lower total body water could cause more severe hangovers and hangovers that are triggered more easily, as hangovers are primarily caused by dehydration. If you plan to continue drinking as you get older, ensure that you’re getting enough water or another hydration-focused liquid or you will get very sick.

3. You Might Have Medicine Interactions

People typically end up taking more medication as they get older. It’s a natural consequence of aging. You ache more, get hurt more easily, become ill more easily, and have a whole myriad of other aging-related factors that cause you to need more medications, both prescribed and over-the-counter. Thus, the risk of being on a medication that interacts with alcohol gets higher as you get older. Many medications interact with alcohol and some of the interactions can be very severe. You can even die from drinking alcohol while taking certain medications. Thus, it makes sense that as you get older and new medications are required in higher amounts to keep you active and healthy, your propensity for drinking alcohol could go down.

Most drugs have some kind of interaction with alcohol. These interactions are because alcohol is a type of drug. It’s a substance that you put in your body that has effects on your body’s ability to perform the necessary processes of life. All drugs interact with the substances in your body, whether they’re naturally occurring or synthetic. That’s how they do the things they do for you. Some interactions are harmless and some are inconvenient and annoying. However, some can be dangerous to the patient or the people around them. Mixing alcohol with Xanax, for instance, can result in erratic behavior that can be violent to others. Other drugs, like opioids, can result in death when mixed with alcohol. In the case of opioids like methadone, morphine, or fentanyl, the addition of alcohol can result in suppressing the respiratory system and death.

4. You Have Poorer Sensory Information

As you get older, your body changes. Among the major changes that happen as you age, your eyesight and hearing typically get worse, with some people losing significant function in their eyes and ears. Unfortunately, these parts of your body do more than just provide you with sensory input. That input is also used by other body systems to regulate your life processes. As a result, with reduced function in your eyes and ears can be problematic when you drink. The effects of alcohol also impact the function of your eyes and ears. Many people become less aware of their surroundings when they drink in part due to the interference of alcohol on these parts of your body. However, as you get older the effects become more pronounced.

One of the things that people don’t know your ears regulate is your sense of balance. Your inner ear is critical in determining what direction you’re supposed to be facing. It lets you know if you’re off-balance and is critical to safe movement. When you get older, the dizziness caused by drinking can be more pronounced due to the interference in your inner ear when you consume alcohol. Additionally, if your vision gets blurry, you might have trouble navigating your surroundings. Alcohol can also impact your color perception and light sensitivity, with these side effects increasing in severity as you get older. These factors can be dangerous for older people who may struggle with taking care of themselves after drinking due to the increased severity of the side effects.

5. You Have an Increased Fall Risk

As we mentioned above, older folks who drink might notice that the dizziness they experience when consuming alcohol is heightened as they get older. Additionally, as you get older not only do you become more likely to fall, but you also become more likely to get hurt badly when you fall. The combination of increased side effects from alcohol and the effects of the alcohol itself makes people more likely to have alcohol-related falls as they get older. The older you get the more intoxicated you get from small amounts of alcohol and that intoxication will also last longer. This issue can make older people vulnerable when they drink.

Additionally, as you get older, your fall risk factors increase. Most people have slower reflexes, making it hard to catch yourself when you fall. As they age, many people also develop mobility disorders, such as difficulty walking, getting up, or moving their joints. These compounded factors can make falling a very dangerous incident for older people and alcohol only makes them more likely to fall. Many young people get hurt while drinking, and they’re young, spry, and rebound quickly. For an older person, these risks are not only elevated, but in the event of a fall, the consequences are more severe.

A fall risk screening can help you plan, but the best thing you can do to prevent an alcohol-related fall is not to drink to the point where your risk of falling is severely increased. As you get older, reducing the amount of alcohol you drink can prevent a potentially deadly fall.

6. Worsened Medical Conditions

Another factor that many older drinkers have to consider is whether they have health issues that alcohol would exacerbate. Many chronic health conditions get worse when alcohol is introduced to the body , especially ones often brought on by aging, like high blood pressure. The list of health problems worsened by alcohol is extensive and includes most if not all major chronic conditions faced by the aging population. Like with many things, the spectrum of possible effects varies by condition. Some effects are more severe than others, with some being more of a nuisance and others being potentially life-threatening. As a result, many young people who have these conditions must also abstain from or reduce alcohol consumption for their health as well as their older counterparts.

The truth is that there is no perfectly safe level of alcohol consumption. It is a poison for humans and most other animals. It just happens to have fun effects when you lightly poison yourself with it. Even at low levels of consumption, you will experience increased cardiovascular risks while drinking. When you get older, not only are those cardiovascular risks elevated, but you have additional cardiovascular problems often caused by aging. Your heart gets weaker as you get older and it can only take so much abuse!

Older folks are also more likely to develop stomach ulcers, open sores in the stomach, or intestines (referred to as duodenal ulcers when they occur in the intestinal tract.) Alcohol consumption will terribly exacerbate these sores. Drinking alcohol when you have ulcers can cause extreme stomach pain and worsened ulcers, which become more common as you age.

7. You May Experience Carcinogenic Effects

Anyone can experience the carcinogenic effects of alcohol. However, older people who have been drinking for their entire lives are at a higher risk because of repeated and long-term exposure to said carcinogen. Simply put, the older you are, the longer you’ve been drinking, the more often you expose yourself to something that causes cancer. Every time you expose yourself to things that cause cancer, you increase your risk of developing cancer from it. So, as you get older, the chances of developing cancer from consistent consumption of alcohol increases.

Cancer starts when the body’s cells get damaged, such as when they come in contact with alcohol. As you get older, that cell damage builds up, and, eventually, that can turn into cancer with enough time. If you’ve been drinking for a long time, you’ll have an increased risk of developing cancer in a place that often comes into contact with carcinogens. In the case of alcohol, that is often your stomach, liver, or pancreas. The carcinogenic effects of alcohol can be devastating. Liver and pancreatic cancer have very low survival rates. The 5-year survival rate of liver cancer is 31% if it hasn’t spread down to 3% if it has spread significantly.

You can apply this logic to pretty much anything that’s carcinogenic, such as smoking cigarettes. However, alcohol is a pretty ubiquitous feature of human civilization, almost every culture partakes in alcohol to some extent. Even small amounts of alcohol increase your risk of cancer. Additionally, in some cultures, heavy drinking is very common or even encouraged in some circumstances. The risk of developing cancer is even higher for people who both smoke and drink.

8. You May Have an Increased Risk of Brain Damage

Some people think that alcohol can cause dementia. Currently, there is no substantiated link between alcohol and true cases of dementia. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t experience something similar. The myth came from somewhere, after all. If you have dementia, you have dementia. If you don’t have dementia but are experiencing similar symptoms from alcohol consumption, doctors refer to it as “ alcohol-related brain damage ” (ARBD). Unlike causes of traditional dementia, like Alzheimer’s Disease, ARBD may not be degenerative in nature. A degenerative disease gets worse the longer a person with it lives. Typically, the worsening of a degenerative disease is unavoidable to some extent.

On the other hand, doctors don’t consider ARBD degenerative by nature. This designation does not mean that you will never experience worsening effects of ARBD if you have it, especially if you continue drinking after your diagnosis. However, worsening symptoms are not a requirement for ARBD. Despite this, patients may still experience changes to their lives and routines. Severe cases of ARBD can impact a person’s ability to live independently and perform the necessary tasks for a fulfilling life.

Many ARBD patients can and do recover from the condition. In some cases, patients can even experience a full recovery and return to their former brain functionality if they stop drinking. Thus, ARBD and dementia are completely different animals. You cannot heal or reverse true cases of dementia; the condition can only get worse.

9. You May Experience Mental Health Degradation

As you get older, you can develop stronger mental health issues. One of the often-ignored problems people face with age is worsening mental health. Many people think of retirement as your “golden years” where you can have fun and do what you want when you want. However, the idleness that comes with retirement can lead to worsening mental health in the aging population unrelated to the body itself aging. Boredom and loneliness can lead to increased levels of depression and anxiety in a population that needs to reduce its stressors drastically to stay healthy. Unfortunately, alcohol abuse is also more common in people with mental health issues. The emotional highs of drinking alcohol can become a powerful self-medication tool for boredom and loneliness, heightening its addictive qualities for your brain as you age.

Additionally, we know alcohol worsens mental health issues, too. The National Institute on Aging estimates that around 30% of suicides involved alcoholic influence on some level. Thus, with worsening mental health, increased boredom, and often heightened loneliness, aging drinkers are at a higher risk of not only accidental injury but intentional harm as well. Suicide and intentional self-harm risks get higher when you drink. Additionally, the negative effects of aging can lead to dependence on alcohol for emotional and physical comfort, especially if the patient’s body becomes physically addicted to it.

10. You Could Experience a Misdiagnosis

Frequent alcohol use also makes it harder for doctors to correctly diagnose real problems. Consider the following situation: A patient reports to their doctor with symptoms of frequent vomiting and nausea. However, they also report starting their day with a drink and drinking frequently throughout the day. How is the doctor to know if the vomiting and nausea they’re experiencing is because they have an illness or because they drink too much? Even if there are tests that the doctor can run, is there time to run those tests? Even illnesses that most people consider “small potatoes” like the flu can quickly progress and claim lives as a person gets older. As you get older, accurate and swift diagnosis of illnesses becomes more pertinent and alcohol use can influence that greatly.

Alcohol also has a pain-killing effect. It’s not as strong as some other drugs that people take for pain. However, not feeling appropriate amounts of pain can result from drinking. Thus, if you drink too much, you might not notice you’re in pain and you may miss the signs of a critical health condition, such as heart failure. Patients who are on too many painkillers are often warned to take their medication sparingly because taking too much too often could result in dulling pain that they need to feel to stay alive because it would alert them to a problem that could be treatable.

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