What scientific research says you should do when you have a hangover!!
Aκόμα και όταν οι πότες είχαν υποφέρει έντονα από τις επιπτώσεις ενός hangover δεν επηρεάστηκε η πρόθεσή τους να ξαναπιούν ακόμα και μέσα στην ίδια ημέρα........
Στο Σιάτλ συγκεντρώθηκε μια ομάδα επιστημόνων που θα προσπαθήσει να δώσει απαντήσεις στο Hangover. Το λογότυπο της ομάδας είναι ένα ποτήρι μπύρα δίπλα σε ένα ποτήρι κόκκινο κρασί που έχει χυθεί.
Η Olga Khazan παρευρέθηκε στο συνέδριο και συνομίλησε με τον καθηγητή ψυχολογίας στο Πανεπιστήμιο Keele στο Ηνωμένο Βασιλεια, Richard Stephens.
Ο καθηγητής ανέφερε ότι η Ε.Ε έχει επιχορηγήσει στην ομάδα ένα διετές πρόγραμμα όπου θα εξεταστούν οι επιδράσεις του hangover. Θα εξεταστεί η σχέση των διαταραχών που προξενούνται μετά την υπερβολική κατανάλωση αλκοόλ.
"Το ενδιαφέρον είναι ότι ο καθένας πιστεύει ότι Hangover είναι κάτι καλό καθώς είναι σαν φυσικό φρένο στην κατανάλωση." και προσθέτει " Είναι μεγάλο πρόβλημα η υπερβολική κατανάλωση, ότι σταμάτα τους ανθρώπους από την υπερκατανάλωση είναι καλό πράγμα." καταλήγει ο Stephens.
Στην πραγματικότητα μια σειρά από μελέτες στις ΗΠΑ έχουν δείξει ακριβώς το αντίθετο.
Στην ερώτηση, πως επηρεάζεται η γνωστική λειτουργία απαντά: " Χρησιμοποιήσαμε μια σειρά από γνωστικές δοκιμασίες, και αρκετές από αυτές έδειξαν ελλείμματα. Υπάρχουν δύο τρόποι για να γίνει έρευνα του Hangover. Στον πρώτο θα ελέγχουμε τα αποτελέσματα που προκαλεί το αλκοόλ δίνοντας στους συμμετέχοντες συγκεκριμένες ποσότητες αλκοόλ. Το πρόβλημα με την προσέγγιση αυτή είναι, εκτός από το γεγονός ότι είναι πολύ ακριβή, είναι και ηθική.
Ο άλλος τρόπος για να γίνει αυτό είναι μια νατουραλιστική μελέτη-μπορείτε να πάρετε τους μεθυσμένους ανθρώπους στο εργαστήριο το πρωί μετά από μια νύχτα υπερβολικής κατανάλωσης. Με αυτό το τρόπο θα διαπιστώσουμε τα συμπτώματα του hangover μετά από μια έξοδο.
Το πρόβλημα με την προσέγγιση αυτή όμως, είναι ότι οι άνθρωποι γνωρίζουν ότι λαμβάνουν μέρος σε μελέτη για το hangover."
Τι είναι αυτό που προκαλεί το hangover " Ένα στοιχείο είναι ο τρόπος που το αλκοόλ μεταβολίζεται. Όταν πίνετε αλκοόλ, υπάρχει ένα ένζυμο στο σώμα που διασπά την αιθανόλη σε αλκοόλη. Αλλά μόλις η αιθανόλη έχει μεταβολιστεί, υπάρχουν συνήθως άλλες αλκοόλες σε μικρότερες ποσότητες σε αλκοολούχα ποτά. Μία τέτοια ένωση είναι η μεθανόλη, και όταν το σώμα μεταβολίζει μεθανόλη, το μεταβολίζει σε τοξίνες-φορμαλδεΰδη και μυρμηκικό οξύ. Για αυτό το λόγω αισθάνεσαι άρρωστος."
Ο καθηγητής τονίζει ότι εδώ και δέκα χρόνια μελετά τα hangover. "Οι περισσότεροι ερευνητές αλκοόλ μελετούν τις οξείες επιδράσεις του αλκοόλ".
Σε πρόσφατη έρευνα του Πανεπιστήμιο του Μιζούρι η οποία δημοσιεύτηκε στο περιοδικό Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research ακόμα και όταν οι πότες είχαν υποφέρει έντονα από τις επιπτώσεις ενός hangover δεν επηρεάστηκε η πρόθεσή τους να ξαναπιούν ακόμα και μέσα στην ίδια ημέρα.
What scientific research says you should do when you have a hangover
If
you have one too many tonight, among the things you might be wondering
tomorrow morning—along with “Where is the Advil?” and “Can everyone
please just shhh?”—are a number of existential queries that hangovers,
in all their guilt-inducing agony, tend to stir. Like, “Is that ‘hair of
the dog’ thing true?” or “Why is it that hangovers always make me swear
off drinking forever, yet I don’t?”
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This
weekend in Seattle, an unusual group of scientists will gather to mull
these and other questions at the meeting of the Alcohol Hangover
Research Group. Their logo, fittingly, is a pint of beer next to a
spilled glass of red wine.
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Hangover
research is a bit of a neglected field, not the highest priority in
terms of health-research funding. But there’s a lot hangovers can tell
us about our brains, our guts, and the epidemiology of alcoholism. Tell
me how you feel the morning after getting blitzed, in other words, and
I’ll tell you what you are.
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Ahead of the meeting, I’ve interviewed Richard Stephens,
a member of the group and a professor of psychology at Keele University
in the UK, about some of the most surprising things scientists have
learned recently about the “gallon distemper.” Stephens has published several papers about hangovers, including whether their severity declines with age. (Answer: Yes. Hang in there, 21-year-olds.)
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I also asked him for some scientific hangover-cure recommendations, for a friend.
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What are you presenting at the conference?
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We’ve
got a quite good research grant from the EU for a two-year project on
alcohol hangover, particularly looking at the cognitive effects of
hangover. In other words, if you have a hangover, does your memory
function normally? And also looking at the link between alcohol hangover
and alcohol use disorder. I’m going to be presenting some of the
preliminary data from the study on that latter question about hangover
and alcohol use disorder. The interest there is that everyone tends to
think that hangover is a good thing because it stops you from drinking
too much, it’s like the natural brake on drinking. And we all drink too
much and that’s a big problem so anything that stops people from
drinking too much is a good thing. That’s the kind of folk knowledge.
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And
yet, a number of studies have actually shown the opposite. If hangover
is a natural brake on drinking, then alcoholics should get the least
hangovers of anyone—that the reason they are alcoholic is that they
don’t have that natural brake on drinking. But actually a number of
studies in the US have actually shown the opposite, that alcoholics get
the most severe hangovers, even when you control for the amount of
alcohol consumed. And so it seems like it’s a more complex relationship
between being at risk of alcoholism and hangovers.
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Do you have any insights so far in how it affects cognitive functioning?
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Yes,
we do. The preliminary data are much clearer on the cognitive
functioning side. We used a range of cognitive tests, and several of
them showed deficits. Which is kind of in-keeping with the wider
literature, there’s been probably 20 or 30 studies now looking at the
links between hangover and cognitive function.
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One
of the things that makes our study interesting is just a methodological
detail. There are two ways of doing hangover research—one is to do very
carefully controlled studies in a lab where you give people measured
amounts of alcohol and look at the effects. But the problem with that
approach is, apart from the fact that it’s very expensive and resource
intensive, that you can only give people fairly mild amounts of alcohol,
ethically.
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The
other way of doing it is a naturalistic study—you get people into the
lab the morning after a night when they’ve been out drinking anyway, and
look for the natural symptoms of hangover following that episode. The
good thing about the naturalistic approach is it’s real drinking and
it’s much more ecologically valid, it’s much more mimicking what happens
in real life, and that you can get a greater range of alcohol
consumption, with some people at the top end drinking much more
significant amounts of alcohol than would be allowed in a carefully
controlled lab study.
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The problem with that approach
though, is that people know they’re in a hangover study, because they
know that’s why they’ve contacted you, so they probably feel a bit rough
and know they don’t have to try very hard because it’s a hangover study
anyway. So there are expectancy effects there. So what we’ve done in
this study, which is completely novel, is we’ve recruited some people to
come into the lab on a morning when they’re likely to have been
drinking the night before, but there’s nothing in the information to
suggest we’re doing a study on hangover. But where, incidentally, they
have been drinking, which in most cases they have, because we timed it
that way, we can look at the effects without that expectancy element.
Obviously people know they’ve been drinking but they don’t know that
we’re interested in that, so in that sense they’re going to be like
anybody who turns up to work having been drinking. They’re going to do
the best they can with the hangover.
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Do we know what causes hangovers?
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Not
completely, but there’s definitely some fairly good evidence. One
component is the way that alcohol is metabolized. When you drink
alcohol, there’s an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in
alcohol into metabolites—after you’ve had a drink of alcohol and felt
drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that’s because your body has
metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized,
there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic
beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes
methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins—formaldehyde and formic acid.
And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit.
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So
one part of a hangover is the production of formaldehyde and formic
acid, which comes online about 10 or so hours after you’ve been
drinking. And the interesting thing about that is that the enzymes in
your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol
first and methanol second. And it means that when you’re in a hangover
phase, if you drink more alcohol you’ll actually stop your body from
breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and
instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact.
So there is a biological basis for the hair of the dog. And that’s one
of the possible risk factors for why hangover might be a risk factor for
alcoholism rather than a natural block for it.
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But
that’s not the only mechanism, there are other mechanisms as well.
Another mechanism for hangover is immunosuppression. So you know that
puffy feeling you get after a night of drinking—that’s due to an immune
response.
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How long have you been studying hangovers?
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Probably about 10 years.
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How has the science of hangovers changed since you first began working on this subject?
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There
are more people working on it now. When I started working on it, there
were only a handful of papers. There was a lot of stuff in the 70s, and
then it all petered out, and then it resurged in the late 90s and early
2000s.
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How
it’s changed is that knowledge has advanced—when we started off, the
cognitive effects were clear. We did a big review in 2008 of all the
cognitive effects studies of hangover that existed and concluded from
that that there was some evidence of long-term memory and attention
deficits. But it was very muddy. Say there were six or seven studies
that had looked at attention, five or so showed something and the other
two didn’t. Science is never as clear cut as you think it’s going to be.
But since then, there have been more studies done and there is now a
clearer picture of attention and memory being affected. And one thing
we’re trying to do in our study is to look in a bit more detail at what
particular aspects of attention and memory are affected.
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Another
development is there’s a psychological function known as executive
function—that’s our ability to think laterally and plan. It’s almost
like the mind taking control of itself and saying “okay, where are we,
what do we want to do next,” and deliberately planning actions known as
executive functions. And that’s been very largely neglected in hangover
research, even though there’s evidence that alcohol use affects
executive function. So one thing we’re doing that is novel is to look in
quite a lot of detail at hangover affects executive functioning.
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Why are we still missing some knowledge about hangovers? Why do we still not know a lot about how they work?
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Well,
it’s still not a mainstream research topic, really. Most alcohol
researchers are looking at the acute effects of alcohol or more direct
questions around what leads to alcohol use disorder.
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And
the funding is still going towards more direct questions. One of the
reasons we still don’t know much is because the research effort in this
area is much less in this area than in other areas, and maybe rightly
so. Maybe there are more pressing questions around alcohol that are
being funded, but one thing about science is that you can never discount
where the next big discovery is going to come from.
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Do ever find that other scientists look down on you or judge you because you study something that’s related to a vice?
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I
think that’s probably one reason why hangover hasn’t been studied so
much. I just think it’s been neglected for whatever reason. But some of
us think it’s interesting, and we’re pursuing it.
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What, to you, have been some of the most exciting breakthroughs in hangover science recently?
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I think one of the best papers on hangover was one of Joris Verster’s papers on the causes of hangover. It really is a document of what we know about it. [Ed:
Verster's paper systematically reviewed common hangover "cures" and
found only a few to be supported by one or two studies. Still, Verster
concluded that "the best way to avoid hangovers is practicing abstinence
or moderate alcohol consumption."]
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I
suppose that one breakthrough is when we founded the Alcohol Hangover
Research group—that made us much more organized. We had our first
hangover research meeting in 2010 in San Antonio, Texas. That was a
really good moment, because personally for me I met all these people who
I’d only ever read. I suppose that was more of a personal thing than a
breakthrough.
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Do you think we will ever find a cure for hangovers?
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There
is research looking at hangover cures. A few things were tried and
found to heal hangover symptoms—one of them was anti-inflammatory drugs
that you might take when you have a headache, and that ties in with the
idea of hangover being an inflammatory response due to
immunosuppression. But then again, given that headache is one of the top
symptoms of hangover it’s not very surprising that headache pills will
reduce hangover symptoms.
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There
are a few other things that have been tried—one was [migraine drug]
Tolfenamic acid, which was found to show benefits, and the herb borage
was found to ease hangover symptoms. At the current moment there have
been a number of studies looking at different treatments. You need
replication to have more confidence that they actually are effective.
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What about people who claim to have folk cures for hangover, like burnt toast or pickle juice? Do you believe them?
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Not
usually. But the interesting thing is that one of the most effective
hangover cures are ones that administer glucose. One of the other
mechanisms of the hangover is to do with glucose metabolism and not
having enough blood sugar. In Britain one of the most prevalent hangover
cures is a big fried breakfast—fried eggs, sausages, baked beans, and
all the rest—that’s well-renowned as a hangover cure in Britain, and it
probably does work because there are lot of carbohydrates in that meal.
And that will restore depleted sugar levels.
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Do you yourself drink?
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Yes, I do.
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Does any of your research affect how cautious you are when you drink?
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Probably
not, but then again, I’m not researching the liver damage and
circulatory disease problems, so directly, no, I don’t think my research
does influence the amount I drink. What influences the amount I drink
more is not wanting to get drunk and make a fool of myself. As a
scientist, I like my brain to be working fairly well and be able to
think clearly. The biggest thing that stops me from drinking is the
feeling of my thinking is getting foggy—that’s what makes me drink less.
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And do you get hangovers?
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It’s
interesting, because there is a review study that concluded that about
22 to 23% of people don’t get hangovers. I’m mostly in that category,
although I get an occasional hangover, but mostly not.
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On the occasions that you did have a hangover, what did you do?
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Have a fried breakfast. That works wonders.
Πηγή: qz - news247.gr
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