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According to a new study, people who suffer from migraine are more prone to headache, which is felt after consuming alcohol.
According to Michael Oshinsky, who conducted the study and is an assistant Neurology professor at Jefferson Medical College, the study on recurrent headaches on animals was not possible till now.
Oshinsky developed a rat model in which headaches are induced by repeatedly stimulating, over weeks to months, the brain's dura mater with an inflammatory mixture. Dura mater is the outermost, toughest, and most fibrous of the three membranes covering the brain and spinal cord.
Oshinsky, along with a neuroscience doctoral student, Christina Maxwell studied the impact of alcohol on rats suffering from recurrent migraines and compared it to the rats who never experienced headaches.
The study found out that the headaches showed relation with hypersensitivity to light, sound and touch on the head and face. Four groups of rats were studied for measuring the sensitivity to touch around the areas of the eyes. They monitored the change in pain threshold of the face resulting from the repeated dural stimulation.
"Our results suggest that dehydration or impurities in alcohol are not responsible for hangover headache," Oshinsky said.
"Since these rats were sufficiently hydrated and the alcohol they received contained no impurities, the alcohol itself or a metabolite must be causing the hangover-like headache. These data confirm the clinical observation that people with migraine are more susceptible to alcohol-induced headaches."
Further studies of means of inducing headaches as well as reason for hangovers are being conducted.
The study will be presented at Neuroscience 2009, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Chicago.
