The few studies on wine and headache were mostly presented as abstracts despite the common knowledge and patients’ complaints about wine ingestion and headache attacks. These studies suggest that red wine, but not white and sparkling

wines, do trigger headache and migraine attacks independently of dosage in less than 30% of the subjects. Wine, and specifically red wine, is a migraine trigger. Non-migraineurs may have headache attacks with wine ingestion as well. The reasons for that triggering potential are uncertain, but the presence of phenolic flavonoid radicals and the potential for interfering with the central serotonin MG132 metabolism are probably the underlying mechanisms of the relationship between wine and headache. Further controlled studies PD0332991 supplier are necessary to enlighten this traditional belief. The idea of dietary migraine or the triggering of migraine attacks with food and beverages has long been disseminated. In 1778, Fothergill first described headache attacks after the ingestion of specific dietary factors, but the variability of clinical presentations among and within migraine and non-migraine sufferers has cast doubts about the real existence of such entity.[1, 2] Particularly with regards to wine, medicine has been imaginative in correlating its consumption

with bad and good consequences throughout the centuries, with the first references about a possible relationship between wine and medicine in Mesopotamia 7000 years B.C.[3, 4] When wine making arrived in ancient Greece, it was enjoyed by the whole spectrum of society, and became a popular Venetoclax nmr theme in literature, religion, leisure, medicine, and mythology. Hippocrates promoted wine as part of a healthy diet. He also claimed that wine was good for disinfecting wounds, as well as a liquid in which medications could be mixed and taken more easily by patients. Hippocrates said wine

should be used to alleviate pain during childbirth, for symptoms of diarrhea, and even lethargy.3-5 Around 1863, a French Corsican chemist called Angelo Mariani developed a beverage containing Bordeaux wine and cocaine (approximately 6 mg of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine). This beverage named Vin Tonique Mariani was suggested as a substitute for opiates and was awarded a Vatican Gold Medal by Pope Leo XIII in addition to an endorsement of its use.[6] Wine’s intrinsic link with the practice of medicine was also featured prominently in the first printed book on wine written by Arnaldus de Villa Nova (circa. 1235-1311 A.D.), a physician, who wrote at length on wine’s benefits for the treatment of many illnesses and conditions, including sinus problems and dementia.[5] For triggering migraine and/or headache attacks, red wine is well known as a trigger and has been so since antiquity when Celsus (25 B.C.-50 A.D.) described pain contracted by drinking wine. Six centuries later, Paul of Aegina (625-690 A.D.