Hangover cure?

“The ‘kudzu’ could cure your hangover”, says the Herald (from the Daily Mail)

We’ve had stories based on unpublished research before. This one is a bit special, because the ‘unpublished research’ is a BBC television programme that won’t be shown for a few days (or, at all, in NZ). And because it didn’t study hangovers or people with hangovers.

The BBC programme is apparently going to report a placebo-controlled crossover trial of how much free booze people drank when they had taken kudzu root extract or a dummy pill — they say they saw a 20% difference. The design is a good one, and given the general theme of the show there probably isn’t much risk of publication bias. Having a reasonably good design fits with seeing a benefit that’s only about half of what was seen in earlier US research.

The big problems with the BBC study are that it’s probably small (the stories don’t say) and doesn’t (so far)give any idea of the uncertainty in the 20% reduction, and that open-bar drinking in a television science experiment may be importantly different from the sort of drinking they’d like to decrease.

As science, the BBC study might actually be ok. But reducing alcohol consumption by 20%, if it does, is unlikely to have a big impact in preventing hangovers. And there is not the slightest suggestion in the research that kudzu root would work as a hangover cure.