London - Women over 65 drink more often than their younger counterparts, a national survey revealed.
One in seven women in that age group consumes alcohol at least five days a week. This 14 percent figure compares with just two percent for those aged from 16 to 24.
The number of regular drinkers was five percent in the 25 to 44 age bracket and 11 percent for those aged 45 to 64.
The report, published by the Office for National Statistics, comes at a time of rising concern over the amount of alcohol consumed by older people. Earlier this year, doctors said safe drinking limits should be halved for the over-65s because their bodies were less able to cope with alcohol and they were less aware of the dangers.
Ros Altmann, a retirement expert, said: “There is an element of older people not wanting to change old habits. They think: why not?
“As long as people are doing reasonably sensible things, who are we to tell them what to do? If people are not ending up paralytic in hospital, it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.
“When older people reach retirement age and they feel pretty well they will go out and have a good time.”
She said those working in their late 60s would have more money than they expected and would want to spend it.
The figures are even worse for male over- 65s – 23 percent of whom drank at least five times in the week before they took part in the survey. The figure for all men is much lower at 14 percent.
The ONS concluded: “People aged 65 and over were most likely to have drunk frequently, both for men and women.
“Excessive consumption of alcohol is a major preventable cause of premature mortality. The harmful use of alcohol costs the NHS around £3.5-billion a year and eight percent of all hospital admissions involved an alcohol-related condition.
“Drinking can lead to 40 medical conditions, including cancer, stroke, hypertension, liver disease and heart disease.”
Over the past year, the percentage of women over 65 who were drinking on five days a week or more rose from 13 to 14 percent. The figure for all women was nine percent.
The increase in drinking was even more marked among less frequent drinkers. Women who said they had drunk alcohol at some point in the week went up from 42 to 45 percent. The breakdown, compiled from a series of large-scale ONS surveys, shows that a fall-off in drinking levels during the recession has ended among older people.
But men and women of working age continue to ease off in their alcohol consumption.
Among all age groups in 2012, 58 percent of all men and women drank at some point during the week before they were surveyed. For men, numbers drinking alcohol have dropped from 72 percent in 2005 to 64 percent last year.
And the share of women who drank during the week fell from 57 percent to 52 percent.
The new evidence of increasing alcohol consumption among retirees follows a call from the Royal College of Psychiatrists for alcohol guidelines for over-65s to be halved, so that men would be advised to drink no more than one and a half units of alcohol a day, and women one unit.
That is quantified by the ONS as one bottle of beer a day for men and one small glass of wine for women.
The ONS report said that the most popular drink among women was wine, with nearly two thirds drinking it on their heaviest drinking day. Men preferred beer or lager.
Women over 65 were more likely to indulge in sherry or vermouth, drinks that have lost popularity in recent years. - Daily Mail