Prickly pear extract may ease hangovers

Soothing teas, fizzy drinks and little pills all claim to fix what ails you after a night of heavy drinking.

But Dr. Jeffrey Wiese, who last week reported that prickly pear cactus could reduce some hangover symptoms, says that a wonder cure is probably a myth. “I doubt there will ever be a hangover cure unless you could make alcohol not do what alcohol does,” said Wiese, an associate professor of medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans.

That doesn’t stop people from trying to develop the perfect therapy.

Previous research has found that vitamin B-6 and tolfenamic acid, an anti-inflammatory drug prescribed for migraines, each relieved imbibers from some of their day-after symptoms. But a 2003 study by Dr. Max Pittler of the Peninsula Medical School in Britain found that artichoke extract didn’t help hangovers.

In the prickly pear study, 55 people ate dinner and then consumed five to 10 drinks of gin, vodka, rum, bourbon, Scotch or tequila. Some of them took a supplement of prickly pear cactus two hours before drinking, while others took a sugar pill.

People who took the supplement were half as likely to suffer severe hangover symptoms and reported less nausea, dry mouth and loss of appetite than people who took the sugar pill.

The study found that the supplement, sold over the Internet, primarily helps relieve one hangover symptom: inflammation. It did not help with dehydration or sleeplessness, the other likely contributors to a hangover.

Researchers believe the prickly pear extract, taken from the skin of the fruit, increases the production of proteins that help reduce the inflammation caused by impurities in alcohol. Wiese and his colleagues used prickly pear supplements from Perfect Equation Inc., a nutritional supplements firm, but the researchers were not paid by the company. The results were published in the June 28 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.