I hate the horrible feeling associated with drinking. A night out with our friends usually ends up with a horrible morning after – but researchers are working on the morning after pill for alcohol.
The pill is spiked up with a natural chemical called dihydromyricetin, or DHM, it comes from a Chinese raisin tree. The Chinese have been using this tree for about 500 years to cure hang overs symptoms from excessive drinking. Naturally, researchers began to look into the composition of the tree to figure out exactly what part of the tree helped in the healing process – and then turn it into a pill for a profit.
They extracted the DHM Chemical and tested it on drunk rats with surprising results – they went from drunk, to not, in 5 minutes. Jing Liang, the lead researcher in the study, said that DHM will reduce the degree of drunkenness for the amount of alcohol drunk. So while this pill doesn’t completely get rid of the hangover symptoms, it greatly decreases them. You could have 10 beers, and feel as if you only drank 1. Eventually, Liang wants this pill to reduce an alcoholic’s desire for alcohol since you’ll practically only be drinking water.
In my opinion, is just going to make them drink more. If people know that there is a pill that can instantly reduce the amount of alcohol in your system in 5 minutes or less, they will get drunk, and then take the pill when it comes time to go home. You may have less accidents on the road, but since the pill only controls the symptoms of alcohol, the medical implications are still something to worry about – kidney failure being one of them
In Liang’s tests, the rats were injected with the equivalent of a human drinking 15 to 20 beers in two hours. If left untreated, the rats would take up to 70 minutes to get back on their feet. After a milligram of DHM, per kilogram of rat bodyweight was added to the equation, the rats would get back up on their feet in just 5 minutes.
The good thing about DHM is that it actually neutralizes some of the “crappy” hangover symptoms. Usually, when a person suffers from a hangover, his desire to do anything is shut down. The rats go through the same symptoms. When they are drunk, and they place them in a maze, the rats coward away in a corner and go to sleep. But when they are treated with DHM, the rats behave like any other rat would – DHM revives their inquisitiveness to reach the end of the maze. It’s as if they only drank water the night before.
Lastly, the rats that were addicted to alcohol were given DHM, afterwards, the researchers gave them an option to drink sweet tasting alcohol, or sweet tasting water. They found that the rats treated with DHM would drink more sweetened water over sweetened alcohol.
If this cure actually works in humans as well as it has been working in rats, the researchers may finally have found a way to cure alcoholism – or in my cases, horrible morning after experiences. Via: New Scientist
