Alcohol consumption and health in ageing

In a paper published in the journal Nutrients, researchers investigated the relation between alcohol drinking and healthy ageing by means of a validated health status metric, using individual data from the Ageing Trajectories of Health: Longitudinal Opportunities and Synergies (ATHLOS) project. For the purposes of this study, the ATHLOS harmonised dataset, which includes information from 135,440 individuals aged 65+ in 38 countries, was analysed. Alcohol drinking was reflected by means of three harmonised variables: alcohol drinking frequency, current and past alcohol drinker. The sample size was n = 135,440. The prevalence of current drinking was 47.5%, of past drinking 26.5% and while almost 51% had never consumed alcohol, 27% rarely consumed it and 22% were frequent alcohol users. A set of 41 self-reported health items and measured tests were used to generate a specific health metric.
In a pooled sample, frequent (often-level) alcohol drinking was positively associated with better health status compared with no alcohol intake (b-coef (95% CI): 3.70 (2.67 to 4.73)), after adjusting for various confounders. Current alcohol drinking was positively associated with better health status among older adults ((b-coef (95% CI): 1.32 (0.45 to 2.19)), while past alcohol drinking was inversely related (b-coef (95% CI): −0.83 (−1.51 to −0.16)) with health status. The different effect of current and past alcohol drinking on the health status of older adults among different age groups was also assessed. At 85+ years old, a certain declining trend was reported between alcohol drinking (b-coef (95% CI): 3.01 (−1.60 to 7.62)) and health status while an increasing one was shown for former alcohol drinking (b-coef (95% CI): 6.15 (−0.97 to 13.2)).
The older never drinking population was the lowest health status trajectory among all age groups. Those with frequent (often-level) alcohol consumption had a better health status trajectory between 65 and 85 years old, followed by those with rare alcohol intake. However, beyond the age group of 85–94 years old, rare or frequent alcohol converged, with rare alcohol intake picturing a better health trajectory among the population of those 95+ years old. Similar trajectories followed when this analysis was applied by gender. Interestingly, only females beyond age of 95 that never consumed alcohol pictured a better health trajectory than those with rare or often consumption.
The authors conclude that being a current drinker and consuming alcohol more often than once a week was positively associated with a better health status. The association between regular moderate alcohol consumption and health status was significant for age groups below 80 years old and octogenarians, females and among different income levels. However, the differences in health by alcohol drinking status started to disappear over the age group of 85–94 years old. Favourable differences in health by drinking status were particularly pronounced in Europe and in America.
Source: Tyrovolas, Stefanos et al. “Alcohol Drinking and Health in Ageing: A Global Scale Analysis of Older Individual Data through the Harmonised Dataset of ATHLOS.” Nutrients vol. 12,6 1746. 11 Jun. 2020,