The only cure to being drunk is to wait it out. But that might not always be the case: Injecting drunk mice with a naturally occurring hormone helped them sober up more quickly than they otherwise would have, a new study shows.
Mice that received a shot of FGF21 — a hormone made by the liver — woke up from a drunken stupor roughly twice as fast as those that didn’t, researchers report in the March 7 Cell Metabolism.
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The find could one day be used to help treat alcohol poisoning, a sometimes-deadly side effect of heavy drinking that lands millions of people in the emergency room every year, says molecular endocrinologist David Mangelsdorf.
The sobering effect of FGF21 isn’t the first time the hormone has been linked to drinking. Scientists have previously shown that livers ramp up production of this hormone when alcohol floods the bloodstream. And while FGF21 doesn’t help break down alcohol, researchers have found that the hormone can help protect livers from the toxic effects of liquor while dampening the desire to continue drinking in mice and monkeys.
Those findings made Mangelsdorf, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and his colleagues curious whether FGF21 also plays a role in recovering from too much alcohol. So the team fed mice enough alcohol to knock them out and waited to see how long it took for them to wake up.
Mice that were genetically altered to be unable to produce their own FGF21 took around an hour and a half longer to wake up than normal mice. But regular mice given an extra dose of FGF21 woke up twice as fast than those that hadn’t received a shot. Drunk mice that were injected with FGF21 were also able to keep their balance for longer…
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