Most people accept the splitting headache and nausea of a hangover as a familiar penance they must pay for the fun they had the night before, but that discomfort is costing the country an estimated $148 billion every year, and scientists want to stymie the staggering economic loss.
There are a plethora of studies on the effects of alcohol, but hangovers, and how to prevent or cure them is an issue gone largely ignored, reports NBC.
“Hangovers are so common and prevalent in every society. I found it to be almost shocking that there is so little real research done on hangovers,” says Alyson Mitchell, a professor at University of California, Davis. There are currently 700,000 articles on alcohol on the Library of Medicine database for biomedical literature, PubMed, but only 400 on hangovers.
Hangovers are costly to companies because the effects will sometimes cause the employee to take an unscheduled day off, or if they do come in, be less productive than normal.
Most of the hungover feeling is based on dehydration and depletion of carbohydrates in the body, but little is known about why the body reacts the way it does by responding to the alcohol most violently after the alcohol is gone.
“The symptoms only show up after all the alcohol is metabolized and gone from the body. And that in itself is amazing,” says Mitchell. “The fact that something is the most toxic after it has been eliminated from the body [is unusual].”
Prohibition showed that you can’t keep most Americans away from the booze, so to cut down on the money lost from hangover employees, Mitchell hopes more research will be done into helping alleviate them, instead of scolding people away from imbibing.