Alcohol and Aging: Does Drinking Make You Look Older?

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 does alcohol cause gallstones life-threatening. Red wine has antioxidants called polyphenols that may help your cholesterol level and protect your blood vessels.

Is alcohol physically addictive?

Drinking heavily and often can have a significant impact on your overall health. It can also age you prematurely, making you look, feel, and act older than you actually are. More importantly, alcohol can age your body quicker than it should. This can result in the increased chances of serious medical conditions developing or minor ailments becoming major ones. Heavy drinking can cause irritation to the blood vessels in your eyes. This is why oftentimes when someone is drunk they get bloodshot eyes.

It can deteriorate your skin, muscles, organs, and brain. As you age, the body’s mechanisms that protect you from free radicals diminish. Therefore, you’re at a greater risk of developing a wide range of health problems, including the neurodegenerative famous people who died from alcoholism conditions that affect your cognition and memory. Regular exercise is important to physical and mental health as you age. Exercise releases endorphins and promotes feelings of well-being.

The ways in which alcohol can affect someone internally are widely known and documented. Overtime alcohol can do damage to key organs of the body including the liver and the brain. Alcohol can also lead to weight gain and other health-related issues. Alcohol and aging are also synonymous due to the negative effects alcohol has on the body.

Alcohol Affects Your Blood Vessels

1. The first thing you can do to reverse alcohol-aging is stop drinking.
2. Look for local volunteer opportunities that interest you.
3. Perhaps you fear that this pattern of behavior will degrade the quality of your physical and mental health as well as your social life.

Feeling better inside almost always means looking better on the outside. Drinking while taking medications across a host of drug classes also can cause serious side effects in older adults, especially drugs with sedative effects. An array of over-the-counter medications can interact poorly with alcohol. These include aspirin, sleeping pills, heart drugs, acetaminophen (Tylenol, others), allergy medication, pain medication, and anxiety or depression medicine. After an episode of heavy drinking, your liver processes some of the alcohol you consumed.

Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse

Retirement or a reduced ability to work can affect your income, and financial instability often increases stress. Drinking may seem like a way to ease your tension, but ultimately it just further worsens both your mood and financial situation. The effect alcohol can have on breathing in older adults taking opioids is stark. In one small 2017 study, when participants were given 20 mg of oxycodone, the amount of air entering their lungs decreased by 28%.

If other family members have also noticed the drinking problem, you can set up a family meeting to broach the subject. If distance or limitations with mobility mean you’re unable to regularly meet with loved ones, embrace technology. Email and text messages are useful for what percentage of homeless are mentally ill or addicted sharing daily life updates and photos.

It was March 2020, the early days of the pandemic. When uncertainty about, well, everything, was too much to bear, I found solace in a glass of wine. My husband and I took our weekend wine-and-cheese tradition and made it an everyday event. We started skipping the cheese, and one glass would morph into two, and sometimes into a bottle.

What it does though, is damage other parts of the body. This, in turn, results in damage being done to the skin. The liver specifically plays a large role in this.