Being old and wiser doesn’t necessarily mean you’re also resistant to alcohol. According to a new study published in the Match issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, older adults are likely to become tipsy earlier than their younger counterparts following alcohol intake.

 

To be more specific, people age 50 to 74 showed more psychomotor impairment and were more likely to misjudge how impaired they were than their younger counterparts, even though both young and older adults drank the same amount of alcohol.

 

For the study, University of Kentucky researchers led by Sara Jo Nixon, now a professor in the department of psychiatry, division of addiction medicine, and director of the Neurocognitive Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville, recruited 42 men and women aged 70 to 74 and 26 people aged 25 to 35. Participants were given alcohol or placebo to drink.

 

Then they were given a test called Trail Making Test in which they were asked to connect numbered and lettered dots as quickly as possible. The test was meant to evaluate visual-motor coordination, planning and the ability to move from one thought to the next.

 

The participants took the test twice, first 25 minutes after drinking and then 75 minutes after drinking. At the first test, older adults did worse than younger people. “There was a five-second difference that looks to be due primarily to the alcohol. Even moderate drinking can result in cognitive differences that are subtle but significant, and we need to be aware of them,” Nixon said.

 

There is only one message to take home from this study, namely, older people need to be wary before indulging in social drinking, as it can prove fatal for them especially during driving.