No hang-xiety! One-quarter on average is hangover resistant
“Unless they know me, people don’t really believe me,” Slater said. “It’s just kind of assumed that when you drink a bunch of poison, your body is going to react.”
Just once, Matthew Slater would like to experience a hangover. But even if Slater, 34, finishes a bottle of vodka, he still wakes up feeling fine the next day.
“Unless they know me, people don’t really believe me,” Slater said. “It’s just kind of assumed that when you drink a bunch of poison, your body is going to react.”
Daniel Adams, 23, also never felt queasy or shaky the morning after a night out. One night in March, he drank a six-pack of Budweiser, then a six-pack of Coors Light, then a few shots (doesn’t remember how many). The next morning, as his friends groaned, he woke up at 6:30 am and ran 4 miles.
Scientists have a term for people like Slater and Adams: “hangover resistant.” And over the last decade and a half, researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking — and others feel nothing at all.
One of the first studies to show the prevalence of hangover resistance was published in 2008. Jonathan Howland, a professor emeritus at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the paper’s authors, said they had been trying to understand how heavy drinking affected performance at work the next day, only to discover nearly a quarter did not get hungover at all.
The researchers conducted several variations, looking at hundreds of students in the Boston area and Swedish maritime cadets.
The team kept participants enough alcohol to raise their blood alcohol content to around .12, so that they were sufficiently intoxicated, said Damaris Rohsenow, a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University who worked on the trials. All night, medical professionals monitored the participants. Each hour, they checked to make sure no one had vomited.
In the morning, researchers would ask participants a series of questions. On a scale of 1 to 10, how dizzy were they? How thirsty? How nauseous? They also looked at past studies among different groups. The findings showed one-quarter on average did not feel hungover. “It was the same number over and over again,” Howland said.
The only question was why. No one understands all the factors that cause hangovers, Howland said, which makes hangover resistance difficult to study. But researchers have posited a few theories for why a lucky few remain immune.
One suspect is genetics, which help determine the rate at which our bodies break down alcohol. People who metabolize alcohol faster tend to have less severe hangovers, said Ann-Kathrin Stock, a neuroscientist at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Genetics seem to play a bigger role for some populations than others. For example, people of East Asian descent often report terrible hangovers, may be because of low levels of an enzyme that helps process alcohol and its toxic metabolites.
Another theory is that people with weaker immune systems may be more susceptible to hangovers, Stock said. Alcohol can trigger widespread inflammation — that’s partly why a bad hangover can feel like an illness — and more inflammation typically means people feel sicker, she said.
People who are hangover resistant also usually report low levels of anxiety overall, Stock added, while those who are already stressed or depressed are more likely to suffer hangovers — and bad ones at that.
@The New York Times
