Addiction spares no age group, but it often goes undetected in older adults age 65 or older, and its treatment poses age-specific challenges.

How should we employ pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder (AUD) in older adult patients? There are three FDA-approved medications (acamprosate, disulfiram, and naltrexone) and two other commonly used off-label agents (gabapentin and topiramate).

As we age, we are more vulnerable to a lot of things—the same amount of alcohol or the same amount of any of these substances is going to cause more impairment in an older person vs a younger one. As an example, our stability and gait can worsen as we get older, so any substance that affects gait or balance will have a larger effect.

How much can our older patients safely drink? And what does “safe” or “low-risk” drinking actually mean? The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which is the branch of the NIH that focuses on problems related to alcohol, has released guidelines for low-risk drinking limits in older patients.

When counseling your patients to quit smoking, you may also want to consider asking them about their past marijuana use. Results from a recent study suggest that there may be a correlation between cannabis and tobacco smoking.

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After reading these articles, you should be able to…

There are three types of sleep apnea: obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), central sleep apnea, and mixed. Of these, OSA is by far the most common, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this article. OSA is caused by excessive relaxation of the throat during sleep, which in some people causes enough obstruction to impede the flow of air.