New Years Heave: The science of hangovers

Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Riddled with stigma, tinged with shame, the dreaded hangover is a lonely and ugly place for the human soul. And the sufferer’s pain is compounded by the fact that he or she will get zero sympathy from the righteously sober and unafflicted. A hangover is a self-induced illness. But it still hurts. Your head feels like someone is trying to open it up with a hot ice-pick. A crazed “wall of death” motorcycle nut is driving round the inside of your cranium. Your mouth tastes like a discarded diaper. Waves of nausea overwhelm you. Your bowels are in spasm. It’s a mess.

Alcohol, if it had feelings, would probably show a distinct sense of irony and wickedness as its worst hangover effects are experienced when the booze has “left the building”. Hangover symptoms are usually at their cruellest when blood alcohol levels are near zero. HCOOH has gone but left behind a cruel calling card and the impact can go on for as long as 24 hours.

As New Year’s Heave approaches, redOrbit looks at the science behind hangovers. It won’t help that morning-after desolation–only abstinence can do that. But it may at least give you something else to think about.

First, the bad news and a warning – hangover science is poor and controversial but we will see what we can unravel.

The scientific name for a hangover is “veisalgia”. The name comes from the Norwegian word kveis, meaning “uneasiness after debauchery” and the Greek root algia, meaning “pain or grief.”

So, now you can tell those around you that you have a condition called veisalgia and need help. Good luck with that.

The main symptoms of the serious hangover include the following:

You feel terrible and you want to die
• Severe headache
• Hypersensitivity to sound and light
• Nausea and Diarrhea
• Shaking/trembling
• Extreme fatigue
• Elevated heart rate and blood pressure
• Dehydration and unquenchable thirst

The more alcohol you drink, the worse these symptoms will be but some factors exacerbate the problem. Drinking on an empty stomach, for instance, is a no-no.

When you knock back those tinctures, libations and designer drinks, your poison of choice – alcohol – enters the bloodstream and one of its first effects is prevent the pituitary gland from creating vasopressin, an antidiuretic hormone. This ends up making your kidneys redirect water straight to the bladder – all those repeated trips to the toilet should give you a clue – the dehydration process is kicking in as you pass too much sodium, glycogen, magnesium and potassium which are all essential for good body function.

It gets worse. Next morning, your body’s desperately thirsty organs divert water from your brain – they don’t care that this will shrink the brain and give you the mother of all headaches. They just want to survive.

Alcohol also irritates and attacks the delicate cells in the lining of the stomach and creates excess acid leading to the classic vomiting reaction and the painful hangover stomach symptoms and loose bowels.

Alcohol itself is not your only enemy here. Booze contains “congeners”, chemical by-products and impurities that hit you like little bricks. These vary from drink to drink but many believe that there effect is worse in the “darker” drinks like red wine, dark rum, brandy, cognac, and whiskey. White wines and clear spirits like vodka and gin are thought to have less damaging congeners. Some chemicals in alcoholic drinks, such as methanol, are metabolized to become nasty toxic substances like formaldehyde and formic acid.

Your own body plays a big part in its own downfall. Your overloaded liver uses an enzyme – dehydrogenase – to attack the booze. This produces acetaldehyde which is actually more dangerous and poisonous than alcohol itself and helps produce those big headaches and nausea. Other oxidation processes are triggered too, including some which convert nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) to its reduced form NADH. The resulting imbalance of the NAD+/NADH “redox” system  impair normal bodily functions and cause triiglyceride production, increased amino acid catabolism, inhibition of the citric acid cycle, lactic acidosis, ketoacidosis, hyperuricemia, disturbance in cortisol and androgen metabolism and increased fibrogenesis.

In the worst cases, alcohol also induces an enzyme called CYP2E1, which metabolizes ethanol and other substances into some serious toxins. This process is even worse in binge drinking when the enzyme can cause a condition known as oxidative stress which can lead to cell death.

Apart from acetaldehyde accumulation, excess alcohol leads to changes in the immune system and glucose metabolism, metabolic acidosis, disturbed prostaglandin synthesis, increased cardiac output, hormonal alterations of the cytokine pathways, decrease of the availability of glucose vasodilation, sleep deprivation and malnutrition.

Are you sure you still want that big night out on New Year’s Heave?

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