Very abnormal hangovers, thinking it could be allergy to alcohol

22 year old female who, like everyone else here, suffers from appalling hangovers. VERY relieved I'm not the only one! It's been going on for nearly 3 years now - today felt like the worst of the lot! Like a lot of people said, I handle my alcohol pretty well on the night - it's only the next day that I have trouble. Relentless vomiting for normally about 10-12 hours - can't keep water down, awful headache, very weak and it just feels like it's never going to end. Doesn't happen every time but it seems to go through stages - I was fine for a couple of months, and then in the last two it's happened probably about 5/6 times. Can't seem to figure out what the trigger might be either. Although the vomiting has now stopped, I'm left with a very sore stomach, quite high up.

I wish something could be done, it's absolutely debilitating. Obviously I love going out and having a good time, but it's getting to the stage where I really am considering not drinking because of it. Going to try the milk thistle though, got to be worth a shot! Will post back here when I do. As I said before, it's comforting to know you're not the only one - good luck everyone!

 

I am 43 and have been having violent random hangovers since I was about 20 not all the time just random it generally puts me in the hospital on IV because i become so dehydrated from the vomiting  it always feels better for a bit after I puke sometimes I force it to feel better I've missed work because of it and it scares my loved ones. I always felt ashamed and blamed it on my overindulgence but I am starting to wonder if there isn't something more to it.I also suffer from anxiety which amplifies the sickness  very time It happens I quit drinking which is the best solution but maybe it isn't all my fault there could be more to it...... 

Please read about "leaky gut". That maybe the reason one gets a hangover even if not drinking any alcohol at all. It´s kind of allergy to certain stuff you have been eating. And alcohol too. Turmeric & probiotic stuff may help. This area belongs to functional medicine. It is a very new area.

I just Wiki'd Leaky Gut... seems connected to heart disease...f**k... I have been having panic attacks and heart palpitations..... this is just terrific.... 23 is too young to have a defective heart. On the bright side I haven't drank since my last "episode" and I don't plan on ever drinking again. Lots of these posts are trying to work around the problem. For me, not drinking is the clear solution.

I am 31 and have had the same thing for the last 6 or 7 years. When i wake up i normally dont feel as bad but it gets worse and worse as the day passes. I feel sick, headache, bloated, dizzy, hot flushes, restless and i cant sleep so suffer the whole day or sometimes 2 or 3. I have ended up in hospital 4 times and they put me on a drip to rehidrate me so normally after i have been there i feel a little better, but still not 100%. The one time i was admitted and stayed there 3 days. The doctors also just say dont drink so are not really helpfull.

This is what i normally do and it works fairly well for me. Before i go out i have a meal. While i'm drinking i have a glass of water now and then and try to drink a powerade or energade at some stage. When i wake up the next morning i have a big brakfast if its possible and buy 2 powerades, 2 yogi sips, 2 sachets of rehidrate and i get sinutabs with codeine. So after the breakfast i have a rehidrate and take 2 sinotabs. That helps me to calm down and i normally fall asleep again. When i wake up i drink the yogi sips and powerades and after about 3 or 4 hours i'll have another 2 sinutabs and try and sleep again. When i wake up after all of that i normally feel much better and could go back to work the next day.

I can relate to what you're saying. My reaction is very similar. It's just sad (frustrating) that we need to go to such lengths to deal with something that other people seem to have very little adverse reaction towards. One glass of wine can leave me in bed the entire next day feeling nauseous and foggy headed. More than that and we're talking fever and vomiting. When I tell people that they think I'm being melodramatic and tell me to drink water and eat a greasy breakfast like I hadn't thought of that. I have basically stopped drinking as a result but I would love to get to the bottom of it and be able to drink socially with friends without fear of sickness.

Hey guys, sorry I didn`t write this sooner. Earlier someone said to simply take a vitamin B supplement, he was right. I got those little power tablets, the kind that melt under your tongue, and I took 1 before drinking, and 2 while drinking (in addition to water). I had a pretty rough night and was anticipating the usual tempestuous death in the morning, but to my surprise, I woke up absolutely fine. I didn`t feel 100%, but it was about the same as how one feels when the don`t get enough sleep.Now throughout the day, I started to feel a bit worse (that`s my normal hangover pattern anyway though), so I took more vitamin B and drank much more water. Also, I find eating honey helps as well. By the nighttime I was good to go out again and repeat the same trick. The hangover that came in the middle of the day wasn`t even that bad, an annoying headache was about all it was.I`ve tried different combinations to eradicate the hangover completely, and i find that this works best:-Vitamin B throughout the night (the more I drink, the more I take)-Water in between drinks (when I remember lol)-And snacking. Definitely snacking. Sugar and starch is actually good in this scenario.It`s not that complicated, and it works wonders. I hope this delivers you as it has me haha, enjoy your bacchanalian squalor!

To the previous poster ... I am so glad you tried the B-12 supplement. It has literally changed my life. I was hoping others on this board would try this solution, but either no one but you has, or no one has commented if it worked or not. I would love to hear from more who have tried it! It has worked wonders for me!

I was taking B-12 tablets daily for 3 months and unfortunately it had no effect on my hangovers. Was there anything in particular you recommend?

I haven't tried B12, but what seems to be helping me is just eating. I've always eaten before I drank, but now I  actually eat while I'm drinking. I'm still experimenting, but it's worked well so far. I had four (4!) the other night, with no hangover to speak of.

Hope this helps.

I'm quite lucky- I know why I have all the symptoms as described above. Obviously many of you have found ways to lessen the effects, which is awesome, however I know why it happens to me in the first place. I stumbled across the answer during a routine health MOT. Gilbert's Sundrome. It's where your liver doesn't work as efficiently as it should, but not dramaticly enough for the medics to notice. Look up Gilbert's Syndrome and hangovers and you'll be well on your way to answers! Good luck guys. Oh, and any kind of rehydraytion preperation for when you've got an upset stomach will work wonders if you can remember to drink it before you sleep. With that, milk thistle, vitamin B12 and snacking we'll all be (almost!) fine. :) xxx

i used to have the worlds worst hangovers to the point where i would be throwing up into the middle of the next night and  terribly nauseous sometimes my hangovers from a saturday will roll over to a monday then my nurse frined told me to try Ranitidine 300mg , sold over the counter for upset stomach and reflux. i took one 300mg tab the first time i had a big night before i went tobed and to my surprise the very next day i just felt dehydrated but it took away that horrible nauseous feeling associated with ahangover and of course the vomiting. now i take it every time i drink and its never failed me, try it !!!!

I dont know if anyone has heard about sulphite intolerance, but it seems to tick loads of boxes. I have only been suffering from these hang overs for a year and that is too long. Its gotten so bad that I give myself anxiety if I have a birthday party to go to and may want to have a drink or two. I end up wasting days of my life in bed, dry heaving, and with a migrane, not exactly how i want to spend my sunday. So have a read of this and maybe it will help :)

There comes a point in everybody's life when it's time to put the brakes on. Babies arrive, the long-hours culture begins to wear you down and, well, the years roll on. With the best will in the world, you find you just can't put it away like you used to. It's what used to be called middle age.

I had to accept, as I reached my mid-thirties, that I'd become an awfully cheap date. Once an enthusiastic drinker of beer, proud to swill pints like a man, now a couple of halves was all it took to put me under the table.

But it was more than just a problem of capacity. Even after one or two drinks, it seemed the hangover would begin halfway through the evening and continue for the rest of the night. I'd get home feeling like hell - ravenously hungry, even if I'd been out to dinner, yet with evil indigestion. I'd down some water and sugary foods in an attempt at first aid, then spend a fitful night with a foggy head and a heart full of feverish anxieties. A full recovery could take several days.

So, you can imagine how much fun my social life was. Parties soon lost their pull when the consequences were so punishing. Weeks would go by without me touching a drop.

When I noticed that I also lost my voice after a night out, I assumed this was caused by the cigarettes that went with the drinks. Curiously, though, a recent rash of non-smoking parties quickly brought about just the same rasping hoarseness.

Then one day in the office here at The Independent, someone cracked open some birthday champagne. I took one sip and began to cough. A few sips later and I was coughing and wheezing like a chain-smoking, 80-year-old miner. The reaction was so sudden and dramatic that it prompted me to put a few words into an internet search engine and soon I was pretty sure I'd nailed the culprit: sulphites.

Here's what I found out. Sulphites are a group of sulphur-based chemicals, used since ancient times to preserve foods and to stop them going brown. Without them, white wine would be brownish wine. They are present in the largest quantities in wine, cider and some beers, but also in many preserved foods such as dried fruit, soy sauce, jam, deli meat and fruit juice made from concentrate - almost all foods I've instinctively avoided for years. They are used liberally on frozen potatoes, which are often used to make chips. They're put on shellfish to keep them from going bad, and in the US they used to be liberally sprinkled on salad-bar salads, until the practice was banned because too many people had bad reactions to them. Some of those people died.

So they're useful substances, but they just don't agree with everyone. Asthmatics seem to be particularly susceptible, but nobody knows exactly how many people are sulphite-sensitive. Isabel Skypala, a specialist allergy dietician at the Royal Brompton Hospital, puts the figure at about 5 per cent of asthmatics, but other studies have suggested that as many as a third of asthmatics have had attacks triggered by sulphites.

There are two schools of thought about sulphite sensitivity, Skypala explains. "The first is that when you swallow there's some sort of inhalation effect, because you're creating a bit of sulphur dioxide and that causes the wheeze and other symptoms. But also sulphites are converted into sulphates by enzymes during digestion. There is a view that there could be a group of people who have a lack of this enzyme and that's what causes their symptoms because they can't convert them. I've certainly seen a distinct group of people who don't get the asthma wheeze but they do get quite a severe gastro-intestinal reaction."

Skypala is writing a dissertation on the diagnosis of food allergies, but has found sulphite sensitivity very difficult to research, because of the risks of deliberately inducing symptoms in asthmatic people, in whom the reaction can be very severe.

Reaction to sulphites is not an allergy, strictly speaking. With an allergy, exposure to a protein in a food (or in pollen, for example) will cause the body to produce antibodies to it, so that next time you encounter the food you will have a reaction. In the case of sulphites, the mechanism is less clear, but unlike, for example, peanut allergy, it seems to be dose-related: people tend not to react to only a little sulphite.

I have a clutch of "real" allergies: eczema, hay fever, allergic rhinitis and shellfish allergy. I come from a family of atopic allergics. At one stage I underwent a patch test to try to establish what was causing a severe eczema flare-up. I was asked to bring in any suspected allergens, to be taped to my back in small quantities for a few days. The skin was then examined for reactions. Unfortunately, the patch of skin that caused the allergy doctor a sharp intake of breath was the one on which had been placed a drop of Chanel No 19, my favourite perfume. So that was goodbye to perfume. And now, does this mean goodbye to alcoholic drinks, too? Or, worse, am I just becoming a terrible hypochondriac?

Well, I may be, but Justine Bold is certainly not. Ten years ago, Bold, then in her twenties, began to get dreadfully ill. She was having severe anaphylactic reactions. She had difficulty breathing, and had vomiting and diarrhoea and peeling skin on the inside of her mouth. During one episode, her lungs filled with fluid and she had to take steroids. It took two years for doctors at the Royal Brompton to pinpoint the cause. Bold was asked to keep a food diary, then go into hospital for a series of food " challenges" under controlled conditions. "They put me on a drip and made me eat some of the things I'd been reacting to: soft drinks, beer, wine, jam, fruit yoghurt. I had a reaction from just one spoonful of strawberry jam!"

Bold was sent away with a rather depressing sulphite-free diet sheet and an EpiPen - the DIY adrenalin injection that can counter an anaphylactic reaction. "Then after one very bad attack, when my boyfriend jabbed me with the EpiPen on the way to hospital, I realised I was getting worse. My boyfriend looked at the EpiPen and realised it contained sulphites. Now I have adrenalin from the States that is preservative-free."

Bold, who then worked in advertising, was inspired by her experience to retrain as a nutritionist and wrote her dissertation on sulphites. Now she says, "If I had an asthmatic child, the first thing I'd do is take them off sulphites. But it doesn't seem to be part of asthma treatment protocol at all." She has learnt to control her condition and now enjoys a fairly normal diet.

Bold has occasionally had short shrift from doctors, including an allergy specialist at one hospital. "That certainly wouldn't have happened here [at the Royal Brompton]," says Isabel Skypala. "But I think there is still a generally held belief that foods don't cause asthma, they can only exacerbate it. But I've seen it happen and I know it happens. The problem is that there is a great lack of research evidence to support this. Adult allergies are under-researched."

It is now acknowledged by most authorities, including the World Health Organisation, that sulphites are not safe for everyone. Last year the EU introduced new rules about labelling. Foods containing more than 10mg of sulphites per kg or litre must now be labelled. There is also a maximum permitted level: for dried fruit this is 600-2,000mg per kg. For wine it's 200mg per litre. It is now one of 12 substances, including milk, wheat, nuts and fish, that must be declared.

There is also an EU "acceptable daily intake" of 0.7mg per kg. That's 42mg a day if you're a 60kg female. A medium glass of white wine contains about 26mg; five dried apricots have 80mg.

The levels of sulphites in wine will vary a good deal, and can vary from label to label, or even from year to year. I can remember a happy and consequence-free evening at a restaurant a few months ago drinking posh white wine. Good wines will generally be lower in sulphites, Skypala says. Champagne, she says, has lower amounts because it's fermented in the bottle. My wheezing episode,might have been caused by a yeast allergy, although she says yeast allergy is rare, "despite what you read in the papers". Or it might be that I was in fact drinking sparkling white wine, which is the worst of the lot.

So I've discovered the joys of gin and tonic, though Justine Bold tells me that, due to strict brewing laws, German beers such as Beck's are also very low in sulphites. It's an acquired taste and not that practical - it is rarely brought round at launch parties. But I can now get pleasantly drunk and arrive home as fresh as a daisy. So make mine a G&T.

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The sulphite problem

* A medium glass of white wine contains, on average, 26mg of sulphites. The EU recommended "acceptable daily intake" is 42mg per day for a 60kg female.

* Most red wine is lower in sulphites than white - though it still has fairly high levels - as its natural tannins help to preserve it. But it may still cause or aggravate allergies, as it contains histamines.

* Beer usually has added sulphites, as well as some formed during fermentation. However, German bottled beer, which is made according to a purity law dating back to 1516, has no added sulphites and is more likely to be tolerated by those who are sensitive.

* Cider is generally high in sulphites because apples oxidise readily.

* White spirits are the least likely to cause problems with sulphites, but beware of mixers: squashes - particularly lime cordial - are usually very high in sulphites, as are juices made from concentrate. Even tonic " with a twist of lemon" could set you off - though fresh lemon juice is fine, as is normal tonic water.

* Some organic wines will be lower in sulphites, and some will call themselves "sulphite-free", although sulphites occur naturally in wine. To be "sulphite-free" under EU regulations, a wine must contain less than 10mg per litre. In practice, few people suffer a reaction to less than 20mg of sulphites. The maximum permitted level is 200mg per litre.

* SULPHITES AS E-NUMBERS

The following e-numbers indicate the presence of sulphites: E220, E221, E222, E223, E224, E226, E227, E228, E150

* FOODS TO AVOID

Dried fruits and candied peel, especially dried apricots, bananas, apples and peaches

Sausages and other processed deli meats

Chips, unless they're made from fresh potatoes

Vinegar, ketchup, mayonnaise and horseradish sauce

Sliced breads, crumpets and other processed bakery goods, which may contain vinegar or flour treated with sulphites

Frozen seafood, and fresh prawns, usually contain sulphites

Ready-made pizza - the dough is often treated with sulphites

Fruit squashes, especially lime cordial

Bottled lemon juice, which always contains sulphites

Grape juice and fruit juices made from concentrate

Dried mushrooms and stock cubes (unless fully organic)

Other foods to watch out for are those with corn syrup, glucose syrup, corn starch, potato starch and other syrups

I'm only 18 and I know I shouldn't drink, but any time I do no matter how much I have the same horrible violent vommitting with no head ache. I really want to know how to prevent this because I don't want to spend the rest of my life being the dd

I am sorry to hear about your problem. I would suggest trying to dilut the alcohol a little bit. I'm not sure what else you could do.

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