If alcohol once made you feel fun and flirty but now makes you feel loopy, tired and headachy, congratulations — you’re probably just getting old.

There’s no question that our bodies struggle more with alcohol as we age. “I’m 53, so I’ve definitely noticed,” said J. Leigh Leasure, an alcohol researcher at the University of Houston in the US.

With every year that ticks by, our bodies break down alcohol more slowly, leading to higher blood alcohol concentrations, more impairment and worse hangovers. A changing body and ageing organs are main reasons for this, Leasure said, but there are possibly other factors too.

Muscle loss

Research suggests that starting at age 30, we lose up to 8 per cent of muscle mass per decade. And body fat typically increases as you age.

Muscle contains more water than fat. So less muscle means less water in your body to dilute any alcohol you drink, resulting in a higher blood alcohol concentration, said Mollie Monnig, an alcohol and ageing researcher at Brown University in the US.

And more alcohol in your blood could negatively affect your organs, like your brain, she said. It could worsen your speech, judgement, reaction time and memory. It may also dampen coordination and balance, Monnig said. Because alcohol becomes more concentrated in your body, it can increase the chance of a hangover too, she said.

Women tend to get more inebriated than men after drinking the same amount of alcohol for this reason: they often have less muscle mass than men do, even when they are the same height and weight. This creates a kind of double whammy for ageing women, Leasure said.

Reduced liver function

Liver enzymes that break down alcohol become less efficient with age, causing people to feel the effects of alcohol faster and stay drunk or tipsy for longer, said Doug Matthews, a behavioural neuroscientist who studies alcohol at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in the US.

Older adults are also more likely to have conditions that impair the liver’s ability to break down alcohol, including metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (or MASLD, characterised by fat build-up in the liver) and cirrhosis (an advanced stage of MASLD, in which the liver is heavily scarred).

When alcohol metabolism slows down as a result of muscle loss and liver changes, people might feel the effects of alcohol sooner and more acutely than they did when they were younger. And their blood alcohol levels may remain high for longer, Monnig said.

Medication interactions

Older people tend to take more medications than younger people do, and some of them can interact with alcohol and worsen impairment, Monnig said.

Gabapentin — which is used to treat chronic nerve pain and seizures, and is increasingly prescribed to older adults — is one example. It hinders coordination and reaction time, and alcohol makes those symptoms worse, Monnig said.

Other medications that can cause potentially serious interactions with alcohol in older adults include certain barbiturates, benzodiazepines, antidepressants, seizure medications and blood pressure drugs.

When alcohol breaks down, it releases toxic byproducts — including one called acetaldehyde — that can lead to headaches, nausea, sweating, rapid pulse and other hangover-like symptoms. The quicker your body clears out those byproducts, the better you feel. But as you age, this removal process slows down, causing hangover symptoms to last for longer, Matthews said.

Older people are also not as good at sensing thirst, Leasure added, so they may drink less water. They would therefore end up more dehydrated after drinking alcohol, resulting in headaches and fatigue. Also, sleep quality often declines with age and alcohol can make sleep worse, Leasure said. The two combined can make people even more tired.

Given these trends — and recent research suggesting that even small amounts of alcohol may be unsafe — it’s understandable if you’re questioning the wisdom of ever enjoying a cocktail after 40, Leisure said.

“It’s just one more thing to manage,” she said, adding that she has learnt that if she drinks, she will end up paying for it later.

NYTNS