Drinking alcohol is like borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
Assuming all goes well, you and your friends have a good time, and then the next morning
you’re paying that debt back in the form of a hangover.
And trust me, the older you get, the steeper the interest rate.
Why isn’t there some miraculous pill I could take that lets me do what I want without any
consequences?
It turns out there might be, the catch is it’s only for mice at the moment.
First let’s talk about hangovers, just to get it out of the way as soon as possible.
Don’t worry, I’ll dim the lights and talk quietly.
Alcohol plays a number of tricks on your body that set you up for a rough morning.
It tells your pituitary gland to stop producing vasopressin, a hormone that helps you retain
moisture.
Without it your liquids go to your bladder, which is why you have to pee all the time
when you’ve been out drinking.
Fast forward to the next day and you’re dehydrated like the plants in my house I keep
forgetting to water.
You’ve peed away things your cells and muscles need to function -- like salt, magnesium,
and potassium.
And your other organs have stolen water from your brain, causing it to literally shrink
and pull on the membranes that attach it to your skull.
Consequently your head feels like it’s being crushed by a Mountain, it’s like being Oberyn
Martell.
Now on top of all that, there’s a byproduct of alcohol that can make hangovers even worse.
The most common way your liver breaks alcohol down is a two step process, and unfortunately
the first step turns alcohol into acetaldehyde.
Acetaldehyde is highly toxic and makes your headache and nausea worse.
Oh, and it’s a known carcinogen.
If you’re drinking at a moderate pace your liver can break it down into the more benign
acetate.
But drink too much and the enzymes can’t keep up, so we get a buildup of this nasty
acetaldehyde.
So with that in mind researchers have been trying to give your liver a hand.
Inspired by how the liver cells work, they created a combination of three enzymes to
neutralize alcohol: alcohol oxidase (AOx), catalase (CAT), and aldehyde dehydrogenase
(ALDH).
The first two break the alcohol down to acetaldehyde, and the last one is the same enzyme your body
uses to turn acetaldehyde into acetate.
These enzymes are nothing new, but the real trick was figuring out a safe and effective
way to get them to the liver where they could provide reinforcements.
The researchers chose to wrap each of the enzymes in a protective shell that’s already
FDA approved, creating nanocapsules of enzymes that would build up in the liver.
You can’t go straight to testing something like this in humans, so the researchers used
drunk mice instead.
Now I don’t know how they got the mice drunk, but I like to imagine teeny tiny shot glasses
were involved.
Anyway once drunk and passed out, the researchers injected the mice with their triple enzyme
elixir.
In four hours the blood alcohol level of the treated mice dropped 45% more than the untreated
ones, and acetaldehyde levels stayed extremely low.
This could be a major boon not just for the shambling Sunday morning masses, but for emergency
situations like alcohol poisoning too.
Right now treatments for alcohol overdose mostly rely on the body’s own pathways to
break down alcohol.
The fast elimination of the carcinogen acetaldehyde could reduce the risk of cardiovascular and
liver cancer as well.
The next step is making sure these nanocapsules are safe with no unforeseen side effects.
If testing goes well on animals, clinical trials on humans could start as soon as 2019.
Until then, just remember what’s lurking for you
A saline drip is supposedly a miracle hangover cure since it rehydrates you intravenously,
but it turns out the saline we use is based on terrible science.
Find out why here.
Did you know darker liquors can cause more severe hangovers because of the impurities
called congeners that give them their color.