eli5: Why do hangovers get worse with age?
In: 2325
As you age your liver becomes less effective at producing the enzymes necessary to metabolize alcohol and remove those metabolites from your body. As others have posted, alcohol creates a lot of oxidative stress on the body; particularly in the brain and cardiovascular system. This means while your liver is taking longer to remove the alcohol, the alcohol and it’s metabolites (some which are even more destructive than ethyl alcohol itself) have more time to hang out in the body and do harm on a cellular level.
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