Learning more about exactly what causes alcohol-induced headaches can provide motivation for building healthier habits and feeling better. Let’s look at why alcohol makes your head hurt, what you can do to remedy it, and how to avoid headaches down the road. In most patients with delayed headache and also sometimes with immediate headache, the headache fulfilled IHS diagnostic criteria for migraine [43, 44]. Histamine intolerance, which results from a disequilibrium of accumulated histamine and the capacity for histamine degradation, has been recently reviewed [41].
Symptoms can develop just 5 hours after the last drink and persist for weeks. Females can be more susceptible than males to many of the negative consequences of alcohol use, such as nerve damage, as they may begin to see effects from a lower amount of alcohol consumption. Many with migraine, and most with cluster headache, are sensitive to alcohol, even in small amounts.
Migraine with aura
However, try not to have too many firm expectations, as symptoms can continue for multiple weeks in some people. Alcohol withdrawal symptoms alcohol and headaches range from mild but annoying to severe and life-threatening. One involves the two-step process that rids the body of the alcohol.
Make sure to avoid hydrating drinks that are heavy in sugar, as either low blood sugar or high blood sugar can make a hangover headache worse. As mentioned above, B vitamins such as B6 and B12 can also be helpful after drinking, and pain medication should be used sparingly and with caution. Ethanol is the primary toxin responsible for why alcohol makes you drunk. Like histamine, ethanol is a vasodilator, which directly dilates blood vessels and can often trigger migraines and other headaches.
Quit your wine-ing?
Drinking even a small amount of alcohol can trigger headache symptoms in certain individuals. These symptoms may begin within minutes or hours of drinking and vary widely in severity. But if you’re prone to migraine headaches, you’ll need to be careful about how much you drink. A 5-ounce glass of wine (or 12 ounces of beer or a 1.5-fluid-ounce shot) may be OK every now and then, so long as it doesn’t bring on a headache. If it does, you’ll need to drink less or stay away from all alcohol. After a night on the town, it’s easy to blame a headache on too much alcohol.