Alcohol and Older Adults: What You Should Know About Drinking As You Age
If you’re blessed with genetics that resists wrinkles and other visible signs of aging, you might not notice the way that alcohol affects your appearance. While those dark circles under your eyes, sometimes referred to as allergic shiners, can be caused by a lot of factors (including, obviously, allergies), your after-work wine isn’t helping. When alcohol dehydrates your body, it’s easier to see the blood vessels on that part of your face. Heavy drinking can cause irritation to the blood vessels in your eyes. This is why oftentimes when someone is drunk they get bloodshot eyes.
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But too much can lead to an abnormal heartbeat and high blood pressure. 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. Five clocks derived from different tissues and different aging related factors show similar patterns.
Drinking Dehydrates and Inflames Skin
There are some things though that you can do to improve your overall health and well-being to counterbalance many of the effects of alcohol-related aging. Such actions can even revitalize the skin and body and help prevent physical aging due to alcohol use. For example, drinking alcohol when you take aspirin can raise your chances of stomach problems or internal bleeding. Mixing it with certain sleeping pills, pain medications, or anxiety drugs can be life-threatening. You have to be old enough to drink it legally, and once you are, it can age you faster than normal.
- Also, alcohol can damage the liver, which is responsible for the detoxification of the body.
- Alcohol can affect the way some vital organs work and make them age faster.
- When this occurs, premature aging results and has vast negative effects on a person’s appearance.
- Your doctor can give you abuse screenings to see how your drinking has affected your health.
Alcohol and Body Odor
While that consequence is temporary, if it continues, it could have lasting effects. Some types of dementia and alcohol-related brain damage develop as your brain cells shrink. Over time, heavy drinking can lead to loss of judgment, focus, and memory. You may have more trouble regulating your emotions or managing your coordination. Alcohol can affect the way your body fights off life-threatening illnesses like tuberculosis or pneumonia.
Heavy drinking can have a direct effect on certain parts of your body and on your mental health as you get older. These studies are adding fuel to a growing sober-curious movement, with the non-alcohol spirits market growing 31% year over year in 2021. If you’re not quite ready to hang up your glasses — drinking is, after all, a pleasurable sensory and social experience — Morrow seconds Kling’s advice to drink mindfully, which is imperative as you age. Although alcohol might make you feel more relaxed in the moment, in the long run it can increase anxiety and depression, feeding into a negative cycle. And then there are the frequent hangovers from binge drinking.
Your Body and Alcohol
As you get older, alcohol starts to affect you more than usual. This can lead to immediate risks, worsening health conditions, adverse reactions with medications, and much more. When it comes to the cardiovascular benefits of alcohol, the results are mixed. Some suggest that moderate consumption of wine and beer, but not spirits, protects against cardiovascular disease, alcoholic ketoacidosis wikipedia while other results point to protective benefits of drinking vodka as well as wine. For instance, some studies have suggested that light to moderate drinking helps protect women against stroke, and other studies have put this benefit down to resveratrol, the active compound in red wine. Broken bones from a stumble are a serious health issue for seniors.
They can also make you look older, according to a new study. Join 40,000+ People Who Receive Our Newsletter Get valuable resources on addiction, recovery, wellness, and our treatments delivered directly to your inbox. The effects of alcohol are a significant factor in making you look much older. That’s why you begin to lose elasticity and develop wrinkly skin, especially on your face. To fight the aging effect that can make you look old, many people use anti-aging creams that include vitamins. Drinking alcohol may make you more likely to develop certain skin conditions, such as psoriasis, rosacea, and seborrhoeic or nummular dermatitis.
Promises Behavioral Health has the resources to help you through every step of your journey toward sobriety. We’ll work with you to develop a treatment plan tailored to your specific needs based on evidence-based practices and proven therapeutic interventions. LED light therapy https://sober-home.org/aetna-insurance-coverage-for-drug-addiction/ can help to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. The non-invasive treatment has no downtime, and each session takes up to 30 minutes. The Dermalux Flex LED phototherapy treatment can improve the appearance of ageing, as well as eczema, redness, and acne.
Still, Tolstrup’s results do not contradict general advice that light moderate drinking doesn’t hurt. People shouldn’t expect huge health benefits from imbibing, but at least it doesn’t seem to harm their health — or their appearance — in a significant way. Moderate drinking — sometimes defined as 2–7 glasses of wine per week — may also keep depression at bay, according to some research, although the same study showed that heavy drinking increased depression risk. Even if you’re not a heavy drinker, the toll that alcohol can take ages you. One night of heavy drinking can make your wrinkles more evident.
Here is a closer look at how a person’s looks suffer from excessive alcohol consumption. In addition to alcohol dependency, being a heavy drinker and bingeing can have negative effects on your body over time. If you’ve been wondering if drinking alcohol causes you to look older, we’ve got the answer.
One global study found that no amount of alcohol is completely safe and that alcohol was the biggest risk factor for disease worldwide. Another more recent study found that any amount of alcohol causes harm to the brain. One of the best things you https://rehabliving.net/giving-up-and-divorcing-your-alcoholic-husband/ can do for your all-around health and appearance is to drink less alcohol. But at Ria Health, we recognize that this can be easier said than done. Many people struggle with alcohol dependency, and it can be hard to know how to begin to cut back.
