Word: alcohol
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...that's precisely the danger, says Nixon, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Florida who specializes in substance abuse. She and her colleagues wanted to study the effects of a relatively small amount of alcohol, the amount adults - mature adults, that is - might typically consume at dinner or in other social settings where drinking isn't the main event. Researchers tailored the composition of their cocktails - a mixture of medical-grade alcohol and limeade - to the participants' weight and gender, to achieve an average blood-alcohol content of .04%, half the legal driving limit in most states...
...Alcohol researchers parse the effects of intoxication - both on the ascending arm of the curve, in which people are on the road to drunkenness, and the descending arm, as the booze wears off. Generally speaking, on the upward slope, alcohol has a stimulating effect - "social lubrication," says Nixon. But on the down slope, as the alcohol is metabolized, its effects are more sedating. To measure the relationship between people's actual and perceived impairment along this continuum, researchers tested subjects twice, at 25 min. and 75 min. after they'd begun drinking. The two motor-skills tasks used to measure...
...Compared with the 20- and 30-somethings, older adults believed they were less impaired as the alcohol's effects first hit; later, however, as they started sobering up, they perceived themselves as much more affected. "On the ascending limb, the [older] adults who got alcohol performed significantly more poorly, but they didn't think they were impaired," Nixon says. "On the descending limb, the older adults thought they were impaired, but at that point alcohol didn't have any impact on their performance." As to why the more seasoned social drinkers may be out of sync, Nixon says, "Older adults...
...general population, says Nixon. Researchers deliberately chose "young" adults around 30 to make sure they were at least several years removed from the undergraduate binge-drinking culture. She notes that the less consistently people binge-drink, the more vulnerable they become to the effects, and after-effects, of alcohol (which is why you rarely hear a college kid complaining, "I can't drink like I used to"). "We didn't want that age group where there's really a lot of heavier drinking on a regular basis," Nixon says. "We wanted college graduates who had only histories of moderate drinking...
...Past studies have suggested that people metabolize alcohol more slowly as they age and it takes them longer to clear alcohol from their system; alcohol may also alter brain chemistry differently in older folks. (That's why Nixon warns people against going out drinking with their parents. "You'll embarrass both of you," she says.) But the discrepancies in impairment between age groups in the current study were not attributable to differences in metabolism. Despite self-perceived differences in intoxication, actual increases in blood-alcohol content happened at similar rates in both age groups - which may be due in part...