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A Hidden Alcohol Sensitivity Could Explain Your Nasty Hangover
Hangovers take a toll — and not just on your Sunday mornings
A 2015 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that heavy drinking costs the American economy roughly $250 billion a year. The majority of those losses — 72 percent — was due to “lost productivity,” which is more or less a euphemism for “too hungover to get anything done.”
Despite all the havoc hangovers cause, science still has a crude understanding of how hangovers work and why they seem to vary so much from person to person. It’s true that the amount of pure alcohol (ethanol) a person swallows tends to correlate with the severity of the resulting hangover. But it’s not all about ethanol.
“There are widely different reactions by individuals to a similar intake of alcohol,” says Roberta Ward, Ph.D., a professor and hangover researcher at Imperial College London. “It is unclear why this occurs.”
A growing body of research suggests that, along with alcohol, a number of compounds found in alcoholic beverages — which differ from one type of drink to the next — may trigger allergic reactions, inflammation, or other adverse reactions. And in some cases, the resulting symptoms aren’t ones that people readily identify with alcohol.
“There are a number of different reasons why someone may have a reaction to alcohol,” says Ari Goldminz, M.D., an instructor in dermatology at Harvard Medical School. “Some of these are well mapped out and understood, but others are not.”
What an alcohol intolerance looks like
Goldminz is coauthor of a 2020 review study of alcohol-related dermatitis, which is a cluster of inflammation-driven reactions that produce symptoms like hives, a runny nose, a racing heart, or diarrhea. According to his study, at least two groups of researchers have found that 7 percent of the population — or roughly 1 in 14 people — experience these sorts of reactions after drinking.
At least two groups of researchers have found that 7 percent of the population — or roughly 1 in 14 people — experience these sorts of…
