The American Migraine Foundation offers extensive resources to help you explore your symptoms and treatment options. It’s important to note that alcohol use disorder is a serious illness that can have life-threatening consequences. Please see your healthcare provider if you are concerned about your alcohol use. People can talk with their doctors about possible methods to prevent or ease alcohol-induced headaches. Other criteria for a person to have a migraine diagnosis include nausea or vomiting and sensitivity to light or noise.
Drinking water helps replenish your fluids and flush the alcohol out of your system. If you tend to get migraines within three hours or less of drinking, this might work best for you. If none of the preventative measures above work or you didn’t know alcohol triggered migraines until after the fact, there are still options available to you. However, if you already have a headache, it is a good idea to stop drinking. If both stress and alcohol are migraine triggers for you, combining them won’t do you any favors.
If you are unable to adequately replace fluids on your own, you may need to see a doctor.
Remember, your health care providers want to work with you to make your symptoms as manageable as possible. Anytime a person with migraine starts a new medication, it’s important you ask a doctor, neurologist, or pharmacist how the medication might interact with alcohol. If you aren’t sure whether your medication is compatible with alcohol, it’s best — always — to avoid drinking until you have more information. People with migraine might confuse later-occurring headaches for regular hangover headaches, which are different from the migraine kind.
Benzodiazepines are often prescribed as anti-anxiety medications. They also have approved uses to manage alcohol withdrawal, including headaches. Delirium Tremens, or DTs, is the most severe form of alcohol withdrawal. The first signs of DTs can come up 48 hours after your last drink, and about 42 hours after headaches have started.
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Then, the results were compared by researchers and duplicates were removed. Any remaining articles were screened by title or abstract randomly by the authors (BB, PN and MS1) with the below presented inclusion/exclusion criteria and PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Hence, can alcohol cause migraines papers that did not meet the inclusion criteria were excluded. In the final step, to assess the exact number of included articles, the authors (BB, PN and MS1) read the appropriate full-text papers and confirmed their relevance to the primary objective.
Drinking too much can trigger migraines, and possibly other types of headaches—such as cluster headaches and tension headaches—in people who are already susceptible to these issues. Such headaches can occur while you are drinking, or a few hours after—even if you’ve had as little as one drink. According to the American Migraine Foundation, internationally, about 10 percent of people with migraine report a frequent link between alcohol and headaches. In some parts of the world, that number drops to as low as 1.4 percent. One study found that alcohol contributes to migraine attacks in up to one-third of people diagnosed with the condition.
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This type of headache can happen to anyone, but people with migraines are more likely to get one. It can happen even if you drink less than people who don’t get migraine headaches. Early effects of alcohol can dull sensations and have an analgesic effect, but as alcohol leaves the body it can have the opposite effect and actually increase sensitivity to pain. Some studies have reported that alcohol can trigger a migraine headache in people who are sensitive to it in as little as 30 minutes — or it could take 3 hours. Another thing that remains unclear is whether the type of alcohol you drink determines whether or not you will get a migraine headache. Some studies found that red wine is a main trigger in migraine with aura and cluster type migraine, but they also note that all alcohol could have the same effect.
- A high risk of bias was reported when a cross-sectional study received five or fewer “yes” responses, a case–control fewer than six and a cohort study below seven.
- In a 2018 study involving 2,197 people with migraine, 25% of the participants who had stopped or always avoided drinking did so because alcohol triggered migraine attacks.
- These headaches cause very intense pain that often primarily affects the area behind one eye.
- Other potential contributors in red wines include tannins, flavonoid phenols, histamines, and more.
- Fasting and skipping meals are common headache and migraine triggers, so filling up your stomach with nutritious foods (instead of sugary drinks) may also help.
Keep reading to learn more about the connection between migraine and headache. Our experts continually monitor the health and wellness space, and we update our articles when new information becomes available. Pains Portal is committed to provide you with information and answers to all your queries regarding a wide variety of health related topics. It aims to help you recognize your pains and aches way before they become a serious illness. There have been several proposed explanations for how alcohol causes headaches.
In fact, many headache sufferers abstain from alcohol or consume less than the general population. It has been suggested that a tendency to experience alcohol-induced headaches could be genetic. And researchers suggest that experiencing an unpleasant effect from drinking alcohol may alter alcohol consumption.
- These congeners also have a variety of effects that can cause headaches, alter other chemicals in the body, and induce the hangover effect if consumed in excess.
- But other drinks like sparkling wine, beer, and hard liquor may be just as likely, if not more, to cause problems.
- If none of the preventative measures above work or you didn’t know alcohol triggered migraines until after the fact, there are still options available to you.
- Energy drinks contain some sort of stimulant, most often caffeine, so the coffee conundrum applies to energy drinks, as well.
- In these retrospective studies, only 10% reported a frequent link.
While it is doctor-verified, it is not intended to serve as medical advice, and users are advised to seek the advice of their doctors before making any decisions based on the information in this article. People who cannot stop drinking should talk with a doctor about treatment for alcohol use disorder, which is a serious but treatable condition. It can’t prevent a migraine, but it can help stop one after it starts.
“We saw effects of drinking that were consistent with what one might see with aging.” One of his latest papers, published in 2022 in the journal Nature Communications, relied on the U.K. Biobank, which provides one of the largest available collections of high-quality MRI brain scans.
More than half of those who experience cluster headaches say that alcohol is a trigger. After a night on the town, it’s easy to blame a headache on too much alcohol. But if you’re prone to migraine headaches, drinking even a small amount of alcohol can bring on an attack. The strongest effect is produced by dark-colored alcohols like red wine, beer, rum, etc. Whereas the other alcohols cause headaches equally or more frequently.