Alcohol Consumption Changes the Aging Clock < Yale School of Medicine

The results, published this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, also suggest that consuming low amounts of alcohol does not cause aging to accelerate. Drinking alcohol directly accelerates biological aging, according to the largest ever study on the impacts of alcohol on DNA. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans is expected to be released in the coming months, so scientific groups are preparing reports on the relationship between alcohol and health.

• When the investigators examined the brains of the cognitively impaired aged rats, the animals exhibited significant nerve cell loss in the hippocampus compared with that of both the unimpaired aged rats and the younger rats.
• Yet, when matched on alcohol consumption factors, women with AUD showed greater white matter disruption than their male counterparts (Pfefferbaum et al., 2009).
• Typical macrostructural metrics are volume, surface area, shape, and cortical thickness.

Does alcohol age you? Discover the latest scientific research to uncover the impact of alcohol on the aging process.

The study linked heavy drinking, over 40 grams a day for men and over 20 grams a day for women, to more deaths from all causes. Strikingly, in the male offspring, we observe an interaction between maternal and paternal alcohol use, with histological indicators of accelerated age-related liver disease in the dual-parental offspring exceeding those induced by either maternal or paternal alcohol use alone. Researchers at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) have discovered that parents who struggle with alcohol use disorders can pass along symptoms of early aging to their children, affecting them well into adulthood. Patients aged 65 and older who sustained blunt head trauma following a fall were included in the study.

Children Can Inherit Early Aging Symptoms From Parents Who Abuse Alcohol, Researchers Find

Trained research assistants screened all older ED patients to enroll those with head trauma. Data collected included age, race, sex, smoking, alcohol use, drug use, antiplatelet use, anticoagulant use, mechanism of injury, past medical history, and loss of consciousness. The study “reaffirms that no level of alcohol consumption is safe,” Alessandro Gallina, policy manager for non-communicable disease prevention at the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), told Euronews Health. That reduction in risk could be due to slower alcohol absorption, or it might reflect other healthy lifestyle choices these people made, Ortolá suggested. Instead, the researchers reported Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, there was no reduction in heart disease deaths among light or moderate drinkers, regardless of their health or socioeconomic status. Drinking alcohol with some diabetes medicines increases your chance of dangerous low blood sugar, and taking it with the blood-thinner warfarin could increase your risk of bleeding.

Alcohol related disease impact (ARDI) application

• This is another reason alcohol makes you more likely to have a fall as you get older.
• Yet, it is not entirely clear whether more activation automatically leads to better performance in all levels of task difficulty.
• These monkeys showed signs of chronic stress (e.g., gastric ulcers and bite scars) typically experienced by animals of low rank in the strict hierarchy found in this species (Uno et al. 1989).

In addition, cell composition differences in cirrhotic liver versus normal liver might account for changes in DNA methylation age, as not only the hepatocytes, but also cells linked to fibrosis and inflammation can be abnormal in alcohol cirrhosis25. One way to address this limitation would be the use of Andres Housman’s reference-free method epigenetic clock, which accounts for cell type-specific DNA methylation effects and different cell proportions26. It remains unknown to what degree progressive alcoholic liver damage correlates with increased epigenetic does alcohol accelerate aging aging, as longitudinal liver biopsy samples from individuals across the life span are not available to our knowledge. Although both liver datasets show age acceleration in alcohol cirrhosis, future larger studies are needed that in particular take into account various demographic covariates as well as cell-specific analyses to confirm this finding. Researchers have not yet determined the reason for impaired tolerance development in aged rats. Current investigations focus on the mechanisms that underlie tolerance development to alcohol in general.

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Microstructural but not macrostructural disruption of white matter in women with chronic alcoholism