Elderly drinking is on the rise
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Figures show that elderly drinking is on the rise and health officials are becoming increasingly concerned about this worrying trend.
In the last five years alone there’s been a 62% increase in alcohol related hospital admissions for pensioners and it’s now estimated that 1.4 million elderly people are drinking much more alcohol than they safely should.
Sarah Wadd who is the director of the Substance Misuse and Ageing Research team at the University of Bedford said: ‘We might be on the cusp of an endemic of people drinking problematically in old age.’
What is shocking about the statistics is that over a third of elderly drinkers didn’t develop the problem until later in life.
Concerns about money, social isolation, disability and depression make elderly people more susceptible to the lure of drink. Alcohol is the cheapest it’s ever been and it’s an easy form of temporary comfort when people are stressed or feeling down. It’s also a problem that is kept under the radar as so many...
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