Many middle aged people look back fondly on the days when they could party drunkenly all night and suffer no ill effects.

But as the years creep by, many will attest that the morning after the night before becomes increasingly painful.

From dehydration to declining muscle mass, there are a host of reasons why we can't take our alcohol as we age, regardless of how much we drink, experts say.

'All of the effects of alcohol are sort of amplified with age,' Dr David Oslin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Wall Street Journal.

One of the main reasons is that as we age, we get more dehydrated, so the alcohol is less diluted in our body - which accounts for hangover symptoms such as a throbbing headache.

'A lot of older people are borderline dehydrated. They have less body water just from the natural effects of aeging,' Reid Blackwelder, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told the WSJ.

We're also more sensitive to the effects of alcohol as we reach middle age because our body composition starts to change from our 30s. 

As well as having less water in our bodies, we often lose muscle mass and develop more fat . Alcohol is not distributed in fat, so people with more fat and less water and muscle mass have more alcohol in their blood.

Other changes that occur in the body with age also increase the likelihood of a hangover.

As people reach their 50s, their livers start to get bigger and become less efficient.

The majority of the alcohol people consume is broken down by the liver, meaning they become more sensitive to it as the liver becomes less efficient.

Dr Gary Murray, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, told the WSJ that as people age, their enzyme levels also dip.

Notably, he says, levels of dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol fall.

This means alcohol remains in older people’s bodies for longer and they get more of a buzz from each glass - and prolonged painful after-effects.

As we age, we can also become more sensitive to the sulphites and tannins in wine meaning we suffer headaches and nausea after drinking.

Older people are also more likely to be taking medication that increases their sensitivity to alcohol.

As some drugs are metabolised in the liver at the same time as alcohol, they can increase the effects a drink has.

For example, the heartburn drug Zantac interferes with the breaking down of alcohol in the liver, meaning people who take it have higher blood-alcohol levels when they are drinking.

Finally, as people age, their brains become more sensitive to the effects of alcohol.

Dr David Oslin, explained that alcohol increases age-related cognitive decline.

He said:‘[As people age] neurons are not as efficient. So you impair them with a little bit of alcohol, they are that much more inefficient.

‘Somebody who goes to a cocktail party at 65 can have one or two drinks and be really impaired.’