ArticleJournal of epidemiology and community health2016
Is regular drinking in later life an indicator of good health? Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.
Article in Journal of epidemiology and community health, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Correlates and determinants of physical activity among older adults of lower versus higher socio-economic status: a systematic review and meta-analysis.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Pooled it
- Prevalence and gender-specific correlates of hazardous and binge drinking among Swedish and Finnish older adults.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- Quality of life in older adults with mood states associated with bipolar disorder: A secondary analysis of the English longitudinal study of ageing data.The British journal of clinical psychology · 2025Article
- A functional approach to model intrinsic capacity in ageing trajectories.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Defining health and lifestyle characteristics of the age 50+ population: cluster analysis of data from the PROTECT study.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Article
- Gender differences in quality of dying and death among older adults: a cross-sectional study in China.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Drinking Patterns and Chronic Health Conditions: New Evidence From Two U.S. National Alcohol Surveys.Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs · 2023Article
- Socio-economic status and trajectories of a novel multidimensional metric of Active and Healthy Ageing: the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Decomposition analysis of health inequalities between the urban and rural oldest-old populations in China: Evidence from a national survey.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- The effects of exceeding low-risk drinking thresholds on self-rated health and all-cause mortality in older adults: the Tromsø study 1994-2020.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2023Article
- Association of short-term changes in drinking after onset of a serious health condition and long-term heavy drinking.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2022Article
- Sex differences in at-risk drinking and associated factors-a cross-sectional study of 8,616 community-dwelling adults 60 years and older: the Tromsø study, 2015-16.BMC geriatrics · 2022Article
- Social determinants of multimorbidity and multiple functional limitations among the ageing population of England, 2002-2015.SSM - population health · 2019Article
- Article
- Associations of education and income with heavy drinking and problem drinking among men: evidence from a population-based study in Japan.BMC public health · 2019Article
- Understanding drinking among midlife men in the United Kingdom: A systematic review of qualitative studies.Addictive behaviors reports · 2018Review
- Trajectories of alcohol consumption prior to the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes: a longitudinal case-cohort study.International journal of epidemiology · 2018Article
- Article
- Trajectories of risky drinking around the time of statutory retirement: a longitudinal latent class analysis.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundOlder people who drink have been shown to have better health than those who do not. This might suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial for health, or, as considered here, that older people modify their drinking as their health deteriorates. The relationship between how often older adults drink and their health is considered for two heath states: self-rated health (SRH) and depressive symptoms.
methodsData were analysed from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a prospective cohort study of older adults, using multilevel ordered logit analysis. The analysis involved 4741 participants present at wave 0, (1998/1999 and 2001), wave 4 (2008/2009) and wave 5 (2010/2011). The outcome measure was frequency of drinking in last year recorded at all three time points.
resultsOlder adults with fair/poor SRH at the onset of the study drank less frequently compared with adults with good SRH (p<0.05). Drinking frequency declined over time for all health statuses, though respondents with both continual fair/poor SRH and declining SRH experienced a sharper reduction in the frequency of their drinking over time compared with older adults who remained in good SRH or whose health improved. The findings were similar for depression, though the association between depressive symptoms and drinking frequency at the baseline was not significant after adjusting for confounding variables.
conclusionsThe frequency of older adults' drinking responds to changes in health status and drinking frequency in later life may be an indicator, rather than a cause, of health status.
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