From there, you’ll enter a challenge phase of reintroducing the suspected trigger food and monitoring for any negative symptoms. With some attention to detail, you should be able to narrow down which foods are best left off your plate. “Some research shows that for individuals that are prescribed monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), interaction with consumption of tyramine can alcohol cause migraines may contribute to migraines,” she says. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Find out why, and what you can do to avoid alcohol-related migraines. Sulphites could trigger headache through the release of histamine, as they cause symptoms only during a period of enhanced histamine sensitivity [51].

Track Yourself and the Type of Alcohol You Drink

A detailed description of risk of bias assessment for the cohort studies is presented in Table 3. In cross-sectional studies, six out of the 11 had a high risk of bias [46,47,48, 51, 56, 60], because they received fewer than 6 positive answers. Table 4 summarizes the assessment of the cross-sectional risk of bias.

Conflicting research about alcohol-related headaches

It can help you identify patterns over time and help your doctor identify if you are experiencing migraine. Mounting evidence suggests there may be a connection between migraine and mental health. Anxiety disorders and depression are two of the most commonly reported mental illnesses among people who are diagnosed with migraine. By learning how migraine and mental health impact one another and ways to manage both, you can improve your quality of life. Learn more about the relationship between migraine and mental health in this AMF webinar. If you aren’t sure that alcohol is to blame for your headaches, try keeping a diary.

• While this is not necessarily true for everyone, it’s true for so many people that a trend toward abstinence developed among migraine-sufferers.
• Keep reading to learn more about the connection between migraine and headache.
• It can help you identify patterns over time and help your doctor identify if you are experiencing migraine.
• Alcohol intolerance can cause immediate, uncomfortable reactions after you drink alcohol.
• If you suffer from migraines, you will learn to recognise which particular symptoms affect you.

Risk factors

• In spite of this, there are some people for whom combining alcohol with a tendency toward migraines.
• A person may experience migraine after drinking if they are susceptible to it.
• Headache after a certain amount of alcohol is likely to induce behavioral reactions (i.e., alcohol-intake adjustment).
• And researchers suggest that experiencing an unpleasant effect from drinking alcohol may alter alcohol consumption.

They involve throbbing pain that generally occurs on one side of the head. It can’t prevent a migraine, but it can help stop one after it starts. Triptans work best when you take them at the early signs of a migraine.

• A sports drink with electrolytes is also helpful for this purpose.
• Regional differences were reported, perhaps depending in part on alcohol habits.
• 2020 research shows that females are more likely to experience hangovers, memory problems, and liver disease from consuming alcohol.
• Unfortunately, nothing can prevent reactions to alcohol or ingredients in alcoholic beverages.

The majority of cohort studies were within the range of 3–7 points, thus receiving a high risk of bias [52, 55, 58]. A detailed description of risk of bias assessment for the cohort studies is presented in Table ​Table3.3. In cross-sectional studies, six out of the 11 had a high risk of bias [46–48, 51, 56, 60], because they received fewer than 6 positive answers. Three studies were evaluated as moderate risk, with 6 “yes” answers [44, 57, 59]. Two of the remaining cross-sectional papers achieved seven or eight points and therefore were low bias-risk [26, 27].

Alternate Alcohol With Food and Water

If you have a pounding headache the next morning, it’s likely a hangover and not a migraine caused by red wine. But while there is some older research from 2009 that shows a link between drinking alcohol with more tannins and gnarlier hangovers, there isn’t really any evidence that they can cause migraine after just a couple of glasses. Since red wine has more tannins than white wine, tannins are a commonly called-out culprit for those fateful migraine episodes. The level of histamines, tannins, and sulfites in red wine may also cause headaches and migraine. Like other alcohols, red wine can dilate blood vessels in your brain, which can provoke a headache. Alcohol can also lead to dehydration, which you guessed it, can also lead to a pounding head.

More on Migraine & Headaches

The majority were female (419/487, 86.0%), actively working (293/378, 77.5%). Most of the females had regular menstrual cycles (247/419, 58.9%). Individuals reported a mean (SD) of 6.1 (3.3) migraine days per month and 3.7 (1.7) migraine attacks per month. Analysis of the 22 included studies revealed 5 cohort studies [36, 45, 52, 55, 58], 11 cross-sectional [26, 27, 44, 46,47,48, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60] and six case-controls [49, 50, 53, 54, 61, 62].

If you are struggling with alcohol abuse or other dependency issues, there are many resources that are ready to help. Whether or not alcohol is a migraine headache trigger is debatable. While some people do experience migraine headaches after drinking alcohol, not everyone does.

Quit your wine-ing?

Migraine.com does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Use of the site is conditional upon your acceptance of our terms of use. This site https://ecosoberhouse.com/ is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. If they trigger migraines look for an alternative without alcohol.

Relieving Headache Pain: Preventing and treating migraines and other headaches

It was a bonding experience for me, and I was never a heavy drinker. Over the years, research has shown that moderate alcohol consumption may provide health benefits over total abstinence. In spite of this, there are some people for whom combining alcohol with a tendency toward migraines. Patients often make this decision after experiencing a strong connection between alcohol and migraines firsthand. In fact, many headache sufferers abstain from alcohol or consume less than the general population.