While you may not be able to reverse some of the damage that excessive alcohol use has already been done, there are certain things you can do in order to make sure the issues don’t get worse. For example, you can exercise and adhere to a well-balanced diet. You might not be able to fully reverse some of the effects of alcohol-related aging naturally. 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. When a person suspects a problem with alcohol, it is essential to seek help.
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Heavy drinking can have a what is smack in the dirt direct effect on certain parts of your body and on your mental health as you get older. “Heavy alcohol drinking might change the aging clock before one develops medical disease. Five clocks derived from different tissues and different aging related factors show similar patterns.
- As you get older, alcohol starts to affect you more than usual.
- With time, this leads to loss of skin tone and a permanent red color.
- No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
- And the alcohol metabolism gene, AD1HB, was the strongest genetic predictor of telomere length.
- No causal link was established between alcohol consumption and telomere shortening, but the study makes strong observational suggestions.
- Regular drinkers can trigger biological functions that make them age from the inside out.
Your Body and Alcohol
Because dehydration from drinking can cause dry mouth, bad breath the day after drinking can also occur (2). However, these conditions can also develop in people who don’t drink at all (5). Alcohol can have temporary and long-term effects on your physical appearance. The severity of these changes usually depends on how long and how often you drink.
Previous studies have also concluded that alcohol only begins to significantly damage health after a threshold is surpassed, rather than increasing uniformly with every drink consumed. After the 17-unit threshold is met, however, DNA starts to degrade quickly with each extra alcoholic beverage. Those who consumed 32 units of alcohol a week, for example, were three years older biologically than someone who drank 10. Telomeres shorten naturally as we get older but unhealthy lifestyle habits like poor diet, smoking and drinking alcohol seem to speed up the process. Older people often have concerns about falling, which is a common cause of injury in seniors.
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No causal link was established between alcohol consumption and telomere shortening, but the study makes strong observational suggestions. Accelerated telomere shrinkage was only found in those who drink and not in those who had drunk previously or never at all. And the alcohol metabolism gene, AD1HB, was the strongest genetic predictor of telomere length. The most likely suspect, according to the study’s co-authors, is acetaldehyde — a toxic side product of breaking down ethanol.
Can Alcohol Affect Your Skin?
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. Again, alcohol affects the skin and can cause negative deterioration of various internal systems.
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. The answer is not so straightforward, based on a recently published study by researchers at Yale School of Medicine.