Red Wine a Possible Trigger? Yes, but…

A recent study in the European Journal of Neurology has confirmed what we already knew – the whole question of red wine as a trigger just isn’t that simple.

This study was just done by questionnaire, but it’s still worth a look. It included 2197 patients with migraine. Just over 1/3 (35.6%) reported that red wine was a trigger for them – a large percentage, considering how triggers can differ so much from person to person.

Most of these patients blamed red wine – also not surprising.

However, when these patients reported on how often an attack was triggered, only 8.8% said that red wine triggered an attack every time, and less than half reported that red wine triggered an attack more than 50% of the time.

In other words, although they believed red wine to be a trigger, chances were good that drinking red wine would not lead to an attack.

Before everyone goes rushing out to buy red wine, there are a couple of issues here. It seems clear, first, that migraine attacks are usually triggered by several factors. In other words, red wine may be a big one, but it’s not always enough to “push you over the edge”. But if you haven’t been sleeping well, it may. So this study doesn’t actually demonstrate that red wine is an unusual trigger. Only that it’s not likely to trigger an attack in most migraine patients when it’s the only factor.

The other issue is that many patients blamed their attacks on red wine, but in the end it didn’t matter which alcoholic beverage they consumed, they still ended up with a migraine attack.

In fact, although red wine was the most common reported trigger, not far behind at all was white wine. And champagne. And beer. And several others.

So you might not escape by just avoiding red wine.

One more note – in the study, these headaches often occurred in less than three hours after the vodka or wine or whatever was consumed. And usually within 10 hours. The researchers pointed out that we’re not talking about hangovers – this is something different.

The advice seems to be the same as it has been for a while – drinking less of any alcoholic beverage is likely to decrease your migraine attacks (see Wine, Beer, and Headache Tips). But researchers should look again at red wine – it may not be the colour that’s the problem.

Read the full study here: Alcoholic beverages as trigger factor and the effect on alcohol consumption behavior in patients with migraine