BANGALORE: Migraine sufferers, before you pick up your drinks, think twice. You may be more prone to a hangover headache after a night of drinking, says a new study. According to a PTI report, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University developed a rat model in which headaches were induced by repeatedly stimulating over weeks to months, the brain’s dura mater with an inflammatory mixture.
They then used their rat model to study the effects of alcohol on rats who suffer recurrent migraines compared to rats that do not get headaches. The researchers analysed four groups of rats — two groups received repeated dural simulation, followed by an oral ingestion of saline or alcohol the equivalent of one to two shots of liquor. Two control groups received no inflammatory stimulation and received the similar oral ingestion.
Migraine headaches are associated with hypersensitivity to light, sound and light touch on the head and face. The researchers measured the rats sensitivity to touch around the eye. They monitored the change in pain threshold of the face resulting from the repeated dural stimulation. These data collected, confirmed the clinical observation that people with migraine are more susceptible to alcohol-induced headaches.
Migraine headaches can be caused by a variety of things, most of them, rather poorly understood. For about a quarter of the sufferers, specific foods seem to trigger the attacks of throbbing headache, sensitivity to light, and nausea. Alcoholic drinks, and in particular red wines, are among the commonest items named by victims as possible triggers of migraine episodes. Doctors have generally tended to blame the alcohol in wine, but another study in London suggests that the cause may indeed be specific to the redness of wine.
The test was carried out by dividing migraine sufferers whose attacks seemed to be triggered by red wine into two groups. Eleven were given a drink of red wine, while nine had a mixture of vodka and lemonade with the same amount of alcohol. The drinks were served very cold, out of dark bottles and drunk through dark straws, and while the people were told that the beverages might contain alcohol, none could guess successfully what they were drinking. Nine of the eleven people who drank the red wine developed migraine headaches, most within three hours, but none of the vodka-lemonade drinkers did. No one in another, ontrol group of people who did not normally have migraine headaches after drinking red wine had any problem (except inebriation) after drinking a similar amount of the wine.
Red wines are red because of a group of chemicals, called phenolic flavanoids, which are leached out of the skins and pips of the grapes into the wine during fermentation. White wines, which have the skins and pips strained out before fermentation, have only about a twentieth as much of these chemicals as do reds. Exactly how the phenolic flavanoids would produce a migraine headache has not yet been fully explained, though it is known that people whose migraines seem to be related to their diets often have a deficiency in an enzyme that helps inactivate phenols.
Says Dr Jayaram, a neurologist based in Bangalore, “Alcohol increases the ph level in the blood. That’s how you get a headache. Drinking lots of water can balance the ph level in the body, because kidneys act as a filter. Neurotherapy also helps, apart from breathing exercises.”