THE NEW YORK TIMES – Daniel Adams, 23, has never felt queasy or shaky the morning after a night out. One night earlier this month, he drank a six-pack of Budweiser, then a six-pack of Coors Light, then a few shots (he doesn’t remember how many).
The next morning, while his friends groaned, he woke up at 6:30 a.m. and ran four miles.
Scientists have a term for people like Mr. Adams: “hangover resistant.” And over the last decade and a half, researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking — and others feel nothing at all.
It’s tricky to determine just how many people are truly hangover resistant. Much of the research relies on trial participants to describe the agony of their own hangovers, a subjective measure. After all, a headache that feels excruciating to one person might not seem worth mentioning to another.
One of the first studies to show the prevalence of hangover resistance was published in 2008.
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The researchers happened upon the phenomenon by accident, said Jonathan Howland, a professor emeritus at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the paper’s authors.
They had been trying to understand how heavy drinking affected people’s performance at work the next day, only to discover nearly a quarter did not get hungover at all.
The only question was why. No one understands all the factors that cause hangovers, Dr. Howland said, which makes hangover resistance difficult to study. But researchers have posited a few theories for why a lucky few remain immune.
One suspect is genetics, which help determine the rate at which our bodies break down alcohol. People who metabolize alcohol faster tend to have less severe hangovers, said Ann-Kathrin Stock, a neuroscientist at the Technical University of Dresden.
Genetics seem to play a bigger role for some populations than others, she said.
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