Researchers found that no purported hangover cure has good published evidence, but one of the apparent strongest was clove extract, at 42.5 per cent symptom reduction

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 “uneasiness after debauchery” and the Greek word for pain, it has become the widely understood medical term for a hangover.

Veisalgia is a broad concept, and hard to measure precisely. It is not simply gastric distress, or headache, or remorse, or self-pity, or dehydration, or dizziness, or a foggy brain, but all of those together, the complete hangover. It does not last forever, but it feels like it.

A new study of several purported pharmacological hangover “cures,” including red ginseng, Korean pear, extracts of clove or artichoke, and a ton of weird chemicals, suggests there really is no miracle cure, other than perhaps time.

British researchers found that no purported hangover cure has good published evidence, but one of the apparent strongest was clove extract, at 42.5 per cent symptom reduction versus 19 per cent with placebo. Most of the rest, like the artichoke juice, did nothing.

Two others that “most warrant 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 which can be experienced following a single episode of alcohol consumption starting when blood alcohol concentration approaches zero.”

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

Hangover symptoms vary according to dehydration, immune function, blood sugar levels and nutrition. Sometimes there are also chemical products of fermentation in drinks other than good old ethanol.

Fixing this, therefore, without resorting to the harmful “hair of the dog” strategy of getting that blood alcohol level back up, is of keen public interest, they write.

So they scanned the medical literature in a systematic way, also finding statistically significant improvements noted across most symptoms for extracts of Acanthopanax senticosus, Siberian ginseng, and Phyllanthus amarus, sometimes called gale of the wind.

But this 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 tolerability and adverse events in a total of 386 subjects. It has its own limitations.

One problem was that no two studies looked at the exact same thing, making it harder to judge bias or inconsistency. Another was lack of detail about “whether the challenge was given concomitantly with food,” or whether the experimental drinker got a meal, which likely resulted in what the researchers call “differential hangover severity and symptomatology.”

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

Science-wise, it was a bit of a holiday lark. It was embargoed until midnight U.K. time on New Year’s Eve. Weakness in methodology and imprecise reporting resulted in a very low quality of efficacy measurement.

But it is written seriously, with limited results of broad public interest. The most they could say is that, when compared with placebo, individual studies reported a reduction in the “mean percentage overall hangover symptom score” for a few supposed cures.

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

L-cysteine, an amino acid, also seemed to have results that looked positive in their uncertainty, with a similarly “favourable efficacy profile.”

But none of them can be properly called a cure, the research found.

“Hangover symptoms can cause significant distress and affect people’s employment and academic performance,” the study reads. That makes purported remedies a matter of urgent interest. “Our study has found that evidence on these hangover remedies is of very low quality and there is a need to provide more rigorous assessment. For now, the surest way of preventing hangover symptoms is to abstain from alcohol or drink in moderation.”

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