Sore head after the football? There may be a cure...

Aldous Huxley once described chronic and inescapable sobriety as a most horrible affliction. I reckon Huxley must have had a stash of soma, the wonder-drug of his book Brave New World (1932) which guaranteed a high without a hangover . . . a soma-holiday, I suppose. But horrible affliction or not, I have rather too often sought chronic and inescapable sobriety, especially when my vocabulary has been reduced to the single word uttered by everyone who's had a hangover: "Nnngggh."

The medical term for hangover is veisalgia (from the Norwegian kveis, or “uneasiness following debauchery”, and the Greek algia, for “pain”), and a prime mover in the queasy catalogue of hangover symptoms is acetaldehyde, produced when the liver breaks down alcohol.

However, an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) soon gets to work on detoxifying acetaldehyde. Could ALDH2 be a hangover cure?

A group of Korean researchers, writing in the journal Respirology last year, tested a putative anti-hangover product in rats.

The rats weren’t taken to a convivial rodent night-spot and plied with drink, but instead given measured doses of ethanol under laboratory conditions, followed an hour later by the ALDH2-enriched anti-hangover product.

Blood tests showed that the product “significantly enhanced alcohol or acetaldehyde-metabolizing capacity in rat model (sic) . . .”

Interestingly, the Korean researchers explain that ALDH2 is pivotal in the development and progression of cigarette smoking-induced airway inflammation in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). They suggest that the ALDH2-containing anti-hangover product could be useful in future research using animal models of COPD.

It is often suggested that hangover symptoms are best blunted if you drink water and eat. So Dutch researchers investigated how this strategy influenced the hangovers among 826 students.

Reporting their findings in the September 2015 issue of the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, the researchers' results "suggest that consuming food or drinking water, either before going to bed or during hangover, have no relevant effect on the severity of alcohol hangover".

Recall

Having a severe hangover will adversely affect one’s ability to recall words . . . especially when you’re being blasted with white noise. It’s hardly a controversial hypothesis, yet one that Drs Adele McKinney and

Kieran Doyle

of the University of Ulster sought to confirm when they recruited 78 students to recall a set of words through the mists of their respective hangovers and the hangovers further aggravated by the researchers with white noise.

The conclusion in the May 2007 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs was: "The addition of a stressor results in a significant deterioration in memory and psychomotor performance when persons are in the compromised hangover condition."

Having experienced many “compromised hangover conditions” I could have saved Adele and Kieran heaps of work.

But anecdotal reports lack experimental rigour; a prized attribute among hangover researchers, as the title of a paper in the International Journal of Legal Medicine confirms.

In the paper, titled “The effect of alcohol hangover on the ability to ride a bicycle,” the sunlit uplands of medical research were further illuminated at University Hospital Düsseldorf, where 71 “test persons” were recruited to get drunk and then ride a bike while hungover. But this was soon reduced to 70 when “[O]ne test person had to be excluded from the evaluation, as he secretly kept on drinking an unknown amount of alcohol after 11pm for an unknown period of time.”

Notwithstanding this lapse, the hungover cyclists provided sufficient data for the researchers’ sober summing up: “Concludingly, it can be stated that the post-alcoholic state after consumption of high amounts of alcohol implies negative effects on the ability to ride a bicycle . . .”

But whether it is one’s inability to recall words or to ride a bike while hungover, proving it by experiment is important. It’s easy to ridicule the scientific method, but the joke is on those of us who ignore the effects of a hangover. And a joke, moreover, with possibly fatal consequences when we disregard scientific evidence and assert our reassurances that we can be trusted behind the handlebars of a bike or the wheel of car or in any other situation where we have a duty to not only not have a hangover but to be alcohol-free.

A recent report in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review describes how 193 students supplied alcohol breath tests to researchers and completed questionnaires the morning after heavy drinking.

The study found that “perceived severity of hangover symptoms influence beliefs about driving ability: When judging safety to drive, people experiencing less severe symptoms believe they are less impaired.”

One finding in particular was that “20 per cent of those believing they were over the limit nevertheless rated themselves as safe to drive.”

Having a hangover or excess alcohol means that we can’t be trusted to do much except to stay out of everyone’s way until we’re sober enough to shoulder responsibilities to our families, our society and ourselves.