ScienceBlog.ie

Inspiration from reading a Times article recently and my own debilitating state post Mammy birthday celebrations, makes me soberly (ish) face up to why alcohol causes hangovers in the human body.

Headaches are caused by a lot of processes going on in your body whilst succumbing to the post pub affliction. Here are just a couple:

Alcohol suppresses the anti diuretic hormone in the brain. The ADH signals the kidneys to reabsorb water back into the body but without it the water goes to the bladder which is why there’s a constant flow of people to the pub toilet. The body ends up excreting up to 4 times as much water as it takes in; and to compensate water is taken from the brain by other organs (how rude). So your lovely brain shrinks in size (and no doubt functional capacity) and begins to pull on the membranes that connect it to the skull. Delightful. Not surprisingly this causes headaches.

When you urinate you also lose salts and potassium which are required for cell, nervous system and brain function. A deficiency in these produces, amongst other things, headaches. And of course not scientifically provable but memories of what you got up to the night before are possible contributors to the pain.
Eyes are the window to the soul? Well then it’s one blurry, sore, puffy sad soul. Alcohol in the body causes dehydration and dilation of the blood vessels. So the eyes of the post night out are dried out and bloodshot.

Approximately 90% – 95% of alcohol you take in is broken down by the liver, and the rest is excreted through urine, breath and sweat. This is why even when you’ve showered and avoided eye contact with your bosses they’ll still be able to smell that previous night’s concoction, which seemed like a good idea at the time, off you.
The outside observer of the hung-over individual may notice a multitude of strange behaviour such as, a Vampire-esque sensitivity to light, sensitivity to sound and touch. Also irritability and moodiness that resemble the Hulk on bad day.

One of the causes of these behaviours is the nervous system being hyperactive. This is because alcohol is a sedative and in response to this the human body tries to counteract the effects by making us more alert. So we don’t pass out (right away). When we go to sleep and wake up the next morning though, the nervous system is still hyperactive and this is the shaking and sensitivity experienced sometimes in a hangover.

And one of my personal favourites; the slow, brain dead, immobile, Zombie like behaviour. This results when alcohol breaks down our storage of glycogen (this is the glucose that is not used straight away by the body for energy). When it is broken down in the liver it is excreted in the urine so the morning after your brain and body are depleted of energy giving glucose, hence the weakness and slowness.

So using the shrunken brain that is hanging on by the threads to put one of those moving thingy’s in front of the other and getting to the cold-box-place where the food lives becomes a heroic feat.

Apart from the looking and acting like a stinky, crazy eyed, super duper-scary-crossbred-monstrosity, the rest of your organs are also having a bad day – literally as it takes up to 24 hours for your body to return to normal after a night of drinking.

Your heart rate and blood pressure are increased; your intestines have not been absorbing water back into the body so diarrhoea is a possibility, and the lining of your stomach is aggravated by the toxins and this send messages to the brain to induce vomiting to rid the body of these.

Niamhyb