Picture this: it’s day two of Freshers’ Week, you’ve barely unpacked your brand-new King’s Residences room and you can still taste last night’s Maccies. You open your phone to 12 new Instagram followers whom you vaguely remember meeting last night. You try to sit up.
Then it hits.
The heavy sensation behind your eyes. The wave of nausea. The meeting with your personal tutor in half an hour.
The infamous hangover is a struggle many students are well acquainted with. But what actually is it?
Alcohol causes the body to absorb less water than it usually would do; water is instead lost to increased urination and loss of fluids. This results in lowered blood pressure and consequent headaches.
Alcohol is also an irritant, affecting the stomach lining and increasing inflammation. Alcohol breaking down in the liver creates acetaldehyde, a carcinogen which damages cells.
The nausea experienced during a hangover is due to inflammation and acid released from the stomach.
So, how can we fix it?
A 2021 study published in the Wiley Online Library by Dr Emmert Roberts, a Senior Clinical Lecturer at King’s College London, concluded that “only very low quality evidence of efficacy is available to recommend any pharmacologically active intervention for the treatment of alcohol-induced hangover”.
According to the study, medication made specifically for hangovers have little effect, with many studies on specific remedies (ranging from anti-inflammatory drugs to Korean pear juice) using “low quality evidence”.
The classic recommendation of eating food and drinking water is a mantra that all hangover victims should live by, so as to rehydrate the body and slow down alcohol absorption into the blood stream.
In addition to this, the NHS recommends paracetamol-based pain killers which will not irritate the stomach further.
Electrolytes or isotonic drinks help the body recover water, salt and minerals more efficiently.
Hangovers are not something to panic over in the moment; your body is just processing last night’s buzz. However, repeated alcohol consumption over a long period of time can cause long-term damage and addiction.
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