From Cloves and Artichokes to Korean Pear, Research Ranks ‘Cures’ for Hangovers

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The word “veisalgia” is a bit of a linguistic joke among doctors. It is not included in the Oxford Canadian Dictionary, but since it was coined in a medical journal about 20 years ago from the Old Norse word for “discomfort after debauchery” and the Greek word for pain , it has become the widely understood medical term for A Hangover.

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Veisalgia is a broad concept that is difficult to measure accurately. It’s not just stomach distress, or headaches, or remorse, or self-pity, or dehydration, or dizziness, or a foggy brain, but it all together, a hangover. complete. It doesn’t last forever, but we want to.

A new study several so-called pharmacological hangover “remedies”, including red ginseng, Korean pear, clove or artichoke extracts, and a ton of weird chemicals, suggest there really isn’t no miracle cure, except maybe time.

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British researchers found that no so-called hangover cure had good published evidence, but one of the strongest apparent was clove extract, with a 42.5% reduction in symptoms versus 19% with a placebo. Most of the others, like artichoke juice, didn’t do anything.

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Two others that “most deserve further study” are tolfenamic acid, an anti-inflammatory drug (84 versus 50) and pyritinol, a vitamin (34.1 versus 16.2).

A new article in the scientific journal Addiction by Dr Emmert Roberts and others at King’s College London describes a hangover as “the combination of negative mental and physical symptoms that can be experienced after a single episode of beginning alcohol use. when the concentration of alcohol in the blood approaches zero. “

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Physiologically, they note, this is not well understood. Alcohol and the substances it breaks down directly cause some of the symptoms, but hangover severity tends to peak when blood alcohol levels are zero. It is different from other poisons.

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Hangover symptoms vary depending on dehydration, immune function, blood sugar levels, and nutrition. Sometimes there are also fermentation chemicals in drinks other than the good old ethanol.

Solving this, therefore, without resorting to the nefarious “doggie-style” strategy of raising that blood alcohol level, is of keen interest to the public, they write.

So they scanned the medical literature systematically, also finding statistically significant improvements noted in most symptoms for extracts of Acanthopanax senticosus, Siberian ginseng, and Phyllanthus amarus, sometimes referred to as gale.

But it was a meta-analysis, a study of studies that collected data from 21 other research projects that measured “overall hangover symptoms” and other measures, including tolerance. and adverse events in a total of 386 subjects. It has its own limits.

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One problem was that no two studies looked at exactly the same thing, making it more difficult to assess bias or inconsistencies. Another was the lack of detail about “whether the challenge was given at the same time as food” or whether the experimental drinker had a meal, which likely resulted in what the researchers call “the severity and the differential symptoms of a hangover ”.

“Only very low-quality evidence of efficacy is available to recommend a pharmacologically active intervention for the treatment or prevention of alcohol-induced hangover,” the study found.

From a scientific point of view, it was a bit of a holiday lark. It was under embargo until midnight UK time on New Years Eve. Weak methodology and imprecise reporting resulted in very low quality measurement of effectiveness.

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But it is written in earnest, with limited results of general public interest. The most they can say is that, compared to placebo, individual studies have reported a reduction in the “average percentage of overall hangover symptom score” for a few supposed remedies.

They say their research “suggests that there would be little harm to individuals” if they took clove extract, tolfenamic acid or pyritinol, red ginseng or Korean pear.

L-cysteine, an amino acid, also appeared to have results that appeared positive in their uncertainty, with a similar “favorable efficacy profile”.

But none of them can be called a cure, according to research.

“Hangover symptoms can cause significant distress and affect people’s jobs and academic performance,” the study reads. This makes the so-called remedies a matter of pressing concern. “Our study found that the evidence for these hangover remedies is very low quality and there is a need for a more rigorous evaluation. Right now, the safest way to prevent hangover symptoms is to abstain from alcohol or drink in moderation.