10 Comments
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Ferien's avatar

"Conversely, no conclusive evidence shows that hangover effectively deters alcohol consumption."

This probably comes from same type of people who claim there's no evidence genetics affects IQ.

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TonyZa's avatar

When I got my first serious job I stopped drinking before work days because I couldn't perform my job hungover. Lots of middle aged people say that worsening hangovers as they aged is why they stopped drinking heavily. These are anecdotes that ring true to me but in social "sciences" self reported data is unreliable and correlations might be hard to find. Ask both my parents how much my dad drinks and their responses will be widely different and probably incorrect.

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Maxim Lott's avatar

Drinking 1-2 liters of water before going to sleep has had a very strong positive effect in my n=1 studies.

Good luck funding that one though...

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Brad & Butter's avatar

What about nutritional supplementation? That would be fun to check as well.

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

As alcohol doesn't cause massive loss of vitamins etc., it is hard to see how taking these would accomplish anything.

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Brad & Butter's avatar

If so, what is with all the conventional "hangover cures" e.g. fatty foods, salt, charcoal, ukon no chikara, eggs, bananas, lemon ginger honey, wim hof? It's weird.

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Eugine Nier's avatar

I'd image a person trying to cure a hangover would notice whether a treatment helped or not.

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cub's avatar

drink 2 fingers of George Dickel black label, "old No.8" before you go to bed.

no matter what else you drank the night before, you will awaken refreshed and ready to do it all again!

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Δίο's avatar

Emil, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this rat study showing dihydromyricetin to be effective -

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/1/390.long

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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's avatar

These kind of studies are barely readable. I mostly avoid them. This one has a large number of rats at least, n > 300. However, I see 2x p = .01, 2x p = .02, 2x p = .03, 1x p = .04, 0x p = .05. On the other hand, there are 25x p < .001. I cant really say whether these were in the important tests or not.

In any case, this doesn't appear to be about treatment for hangover, but prevention of alcoholism like the commonly used drug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram

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