Is it true that drinking alcohol "relieves pain"? Science surprises with its answer

It has been said that “alcohol relieves pain”. However, the opposite also happens: its abusive consumption makes us more sensitive to chronic physical discomfort.. In fact, more than half of people with alcohol use disorder experience significant and persistent pain.. This phenomenon is more common in women: it affects them in around 60% of cases, while in men, the percentage drops to 50% of cases.

Research published in the British Journal of Pharmacology has shown why chronic alcohol consumption can cause long-term painful nerve damage, known as alcoholic neuropathy.. In addition, it is also possible to experience allodynia during alcohol withdrawal, a condition in which a non-painful stimulus causes pain or discomfort.. This is: drinking hurts and stop drinking too. But why? Before how much do I consume? And is it false then that alcohol relieves physical pain?

In turn, does alcohol relieve pain?

“There is an urgent need to better understand the relationship between chronic pain and alcohol dependence,” says lead author Marisa Roberto, Schimmel Family Chair in Molecular Medicine and Scripps Research Professor of Neuroscience.. In this way, governments and the medical community could raise awareness of this consequence of abuse. However, verifying that excess alcohol hurts has not been easy for this team of scientists.

And it is that “pain is not only a symptom of the abusive consumption of alcohol, but it is also the frequent reason that drives them to increase the consumption of alcohol”, explains the author. It is a vicious cycle caused by the potential of alcohol to act as a pain reliever.

And yes, there are studies that recognize that it alleviates pain for a long time. Research suggests that alcohol has an analgesic effect and may relieve hyperalgesia (increased sensitivity to pain) even in non-toxic doses.. The problem is that, according to the study, there is a large number of drinkers who claim that they consume alcohol to moderate the pain. But this could be exactly what is making it worse.

When does it hurt to drink alcohol?

To date, the biological mechanisms responsible for chronic pain associated with alcohol abuse remain unclear.. But the new study sheds light. Broadly, they believe they have discovered the underlying causes of alcohol-induced neuropathic pain and withdrawal-related allodynia.. And at what point of consumption is the pain caused by these two conditions experienced?

To reach their conclusions, they compared pain in alcohol-dependent mice, moderate but non-dependent drinkers, and mice that had never been exposed to alcohol.. In the dependent mice, allodynia developed during alcohol withdrawal.. Subsequent access to alcohol significantly decreased pain sensitivity.

On the other hand, approximately half of the non-alcohol-dependent mice also showed signs of increased pain sensitivity during withdrawal, but, unlike the dependent mice, this neuropathy was not reversed by re-exposure to alcohol.

When the levels of inflammatory proteins in the animals were measured, it was found that while the inflammatory pathways were elevated in both the dependent and non-dependent animals, some specific molecules were only increased in the dependent mice.. This indicates that the two types of pain may be due to different molecular mechanisms.. It also suggests which inflammatory proteins may be useful as drug targets to combat alcohol-related pain.

“These two types of pain vary enormously, so it's important to be able to tell them apart and develop different ways to treat each type,” says study author Dr. Vittoria Borgonetti, of Scripps Research in La Jolla, California.

• This is the scientific reason why humans like alcohol