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Older Binge Drinkers Experience Fewer Hangovers, Study Finds

A new study has found that the severity of hangovers decrease with age. The Danish authors, writing in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, suggest that older adults who binge drink do so to a lesser intensity than younger adults.

While hangovers are a common phenomenon, little is known about hangover differences across the lifespan. The authors analyzed the data of 51,645 individuals, between 18 to 94 years of age, taken from the Danish Health Examination Survey (DANHES), an Internet-based health survey which asked participants about their diet, smoking, alcohol and physical activity.

“We found that the tendency to have hangovers decreased by age,” said Janne Tolstrup. “The first explanation is that this would be due to differences in drinking pattern in different age groups. However, trying to account for such differences as much as we could, did not even out the differences in hangover tendency. In other words, while it is true that older individuals on average binge-drink less often than younger individuals, we did not find in our data that results were due to differences in drinking patterns.”