Member-only story
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.
