"older drinkers"

[gillhalfpint]

I opened Hondo's Cask Pub and Kitchen and Greene King link because I have been to the pub and was interested in reading the article, and enjoyed reading what it said too.

I use my ability to choose what I want to read, and do appreciate a little clue as to what the link contains, as I like to spend a some of my time away from the PC and do pub reviewing and photo taking. Oooh the bus in 15 minutes --- must fly.

[NickDavies]

For those who are interested, here's the relevant bit of the original paper:

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/files/pdfversion/CR165.pdf

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alcohol misuse and older people: should guidelines
for ‘sensible limits’ be modified?

Sensible limits for alcohol consumption by older people need to be reexamined.
Effects of the ageing process and metabolic changes probably
mean that they are lower than the limits recommended by the World Health
Organization for men and women of working age.
The concept of ‘sensible limits’ in assessing harm from alcohol is
now more than 15 years old. Over the past 5 years, new evidence has
emerged that suggests that guidelines for people aged 65 and over should
be changed. The original concept of drinking over ‘sensible limits’ arose
from a consensus statement from a working group of the Royal Colleges
of Physicians, Psychiatrists and General Practitioners in 1995, defining
recommended weekly limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 units
for women (Royal College of Physicians, 1995). To improve the accuracy
of these recommendations in relation to drinkers who concentrate their
alcohol consumption over a shorter time and remain under the threshold for
recommended weekly limits, the Department of Health (1995) defined these
limits in terms of units of alcohol per day: a maximum of 4 units per day for
men and 3 units for women.
Older people tend to show higher blood alcohol levels than younger
people on drinking the same amount of alcohol. This difference is attributable
to a lower body mass : water ratio and less efficient alcohol metabolism in
older people. In older drinkers, there is also ample evidence for alcoholrelated
harm at lower levels of alcohol intake compared with younger
people. For example, increased body sway in older people is associated with
normal blood alcohol levels (Beresford & Lucey, 1995). Drinking more than
13 units of alcohol per week for either men or women over 65 is associated
with impairment in activities of daily living (Moore et al, 2003). More recent
evidence from the USA, based on alcohol-related harm/alcohol misuse, has
defined ‘at-risk’ drinking in older people as being more than 1.5 units of
alcohol on any one day or more than 11 units per week for both men and
women (National Institutes of Health, 2005). The most recent evidence
suggests that more than 3 units per day and 11 units per week for older
men and women are associated with alcohol-related problems. Whereas
in younger people, acute heavy (‘binge’) drinking is defined as 8 or more
units in a single session for men and 6 units for women, the corresponding
limits for older men and women are 4.5 and 3 units respectively (Moos
et al, 2009). Recommended limits for safe drinking by older people in the
UK require further consideration to address the problem of a growing older
population, in whom the cohort effects of changing drinking habits are likely
to be associated with an increasing public health burden from alcohol-related
morbidity and mortality.

[ETA]

For those who are interested, here's the relevant bit of the original paper:

... Recommended limits for safe drinking by older people in the
UK require further consideration to address the problem of a growing older
population, in whom the cohort effects of changing drinking habits are likely
to be associated with an increasing public health burden from alcohol-related
morbidity and mortality.

Yes, requires "further consideration", but that needs to include an assessment of the positive health effects of low-level alcohol consumption, many of which tend to be overlooked by these polemic studies in order either to reinforce the point the antis want to make or (somewhat patronisingly) to allow people to draw simple conclusions from an over-simplified issue. Or maybe they're just too lazy to produce a balanced paper.