By Brenda Goodman, MA WebMD
Health News Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD June 20, 2012 -- Many migraine
sufferers find that the pleasure of a having a glass of red wine is soon
followed by the pain of a headache. Now a small new study suggests that when it
comes to migraines, some types of red wine may be more likely to trigger a headache
than others. "My suggestion is the more tannins the wine has, [the] more
migraine attacks it triggers," says researcher Abouch V. Krymchantowski,
MD, PhD, of the Rio Headache Center
in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil , in an email to WebMD. Tannins
are flavonoids in red wine that give it a drying, sometimes puckering quality.
The more tannins a wine has, the more it will dry out your mouth after you sip
it. No one is quite sure why red wine may trigger headaches, but some studies
have shown that tannins may boost production of the brain chemical serotonin.
Changes in serotonin levels may trigger migraines in susceptible individuals. Krymchantowski
asked 40 patients at his headache clinic to try an experiment. The patients had
said their migraines were triggered by drinking red wine. He gave them
half-bottles of four different kinds of wine: a malbec, a tannat, a cabernet
sauvignon, and a merlot. All the wines were from South
America . The malbec and the tannat were high in tannins, while the
carbernet and the merlot had lower tannin levels. He asked people to wait at
least four days after drinking one of the half-bottles before they tried
another. Thirty-three patients completed the study. Nearly 90% had at least one
migraine attack within 12 hours of drinking one of the half-bottles of red
wine. About half of the people in the study had at least two migraine attacks
after drinking the various reds. About a third of patients got a migraine after
every half-bottle. Four people didn't get a migraine after drinking any of the
wines. Among the 18 patients who had at least two migraine attacks after
drinking the red wines, Krymchantowski says the wines with the highest tannin
content, the tannat and the malbec, were the most likely to have been the
apparent triggers of those attacks. The study was presented at the 54th Annual
Meeting of the American Headache Society in Los Angeles .
No comments:
Post a Comment