People who suffer with cluster headaches are particularly sensitive to dark beers, according to Dr. Aurora. If alcohol is a headache trigger for you, think before you drink. In other words, the best treatment for a cocktail headache is alcohol and headaches actually preventing one in the first place. Before consuming a cocktail, ask yourself if it is worth developing a headache over and ruining your celebration or holiday. Alcohol is a depressant that affects the central nervous system.

• Scientific rigor is lacking to prove what patients have reported for centuries about wine triggering migraine attacks.
• Alcohol has different effects on the body depending on when you drink it.
• And for about one-third of people who have migraines, alcohol is also a trigger.
• However, disagreement between cranial vasodilatation and drug-provoked headache suggests that vasodilatation per se could not explain the induced headache.

Many of the same tips for preventing a headache after drinking also work for treating one. Hydration and electrolyte replacement is one of the best things you can do to help recover from an alcohol-induced headache. 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.

How to avoid or treat alcohol-related headaches

Sulphites have not been shown convincingly to lead to headache in individuals with sulphite sensitivity. Sulphites are considered to be the cause of red wine intolerance, particularly asthma . The relation between tyramine and migraine has been studied most extensively. Half were pioneering studies performed by Hanington et al. (see ) which showed that oral tyramine provoked headaches in dietary migraine patients but not in nondietary migraine or controls. However, two conclusive negative studies were found on the relation between oral tyramine and headache attack in dietary and nondietary migraine. No differences exist between migraine and tension headache in the frequency of alcohol as a trigger [17, 18, 20, 24–26, 29] .

• Try to drink beer in moderation and stretch out drinking over several hours.
• No one is exactly sure how ethanol causes its various effects, but once absorbed from the stomach into the bloodstream it can freely cross out of the blood and into nerve cells of the brain.
• Alcoholic beverages as trigger factor and the effect on alcohol consumption behavior in patients with migraine.
• This is the typical type of headache induced by alcohol, compared with delayed alcohol-induced headache that appears the next morning — also known as the hangover headache.
• If you find consistent agreement among these factors and the headache, alcohol is possibly causing headaches.
• Alcohol not only contains histamines, it can also cause your body to create them.
• For example, if a person drinks liquor before beer, they are likely to feel the effects of the alcohol sooner.

If you find consistent agreement among these factors and the headache, alcohol is possibly causing headaches. This hangover headache appears in the next morning after alcohol intake. At this time the blood alcohol level is falling and reaches zero.

Cluster Headaches

In fact, many headache sufferers abstain from alcohol or consume less than the general population. Six studies report ADs as a trigger of migraine with aura , four of them by the same Danish group . Four studies report ADs trigger MA attack in a percentage similar to that found in MO patients (about 30%). In these studies, MA coexists with MO in a variable percentage of patients or this was not specified. Two studies report a much lesser percentage Other studies, carried out in Japan, Turkey, and Italy, find that ADs never precipitated MA, but these studies also report that ADs rarely precipitate MO and TH.

However, if you find that your likelihood of getting a tension headache increases with the consumption of alcohol, you may want to avoid drinking if you have chronic tension headaches. This eliminates at least one of the possible triggers of tension headaches. Some medical professionals believe it is a chemical sensitivity to the compounds in alcohol that trigger cluster headaches. Others blame the congeners in alcohol or the dilating effects of alcohol. Dr. Crystal said she finds that many of her patients have a sensitivity to alcohol. Others find that it is more likely to trigger migraine attacks during vulnerable periods—hormonal changes, stress, and weather changes, for example.