Researchers at UC Davis are seeking to raise about $25,000 from the public, not from a government grant, in an effort to understand why some people suffer moderate to severe headaches after drinking red wine.
The plan is to compare a list of wines that cause, and those that do not cause headaches, according to patients who suffer from this affliction, and chemically analyze those wines. We will then compare the inventory of substances in those that trigger headaches and those that do not. We hope that we will be able to identify the culprits from that comparison.
Why not seek a grant from National Institutes of Health to fund this research rather than the uncertainty of crowdsourcing? “Good Question. The NIH has never been supportive of headache research, despite the huge amount of suffering migraine and related conditions cause,” the UC Davis team says. “We think not only will this study help answer a centuries old riddle, but will also shed some much-needed light on the spectrum of headache conditions.”
To do that, the research team includes experts in wine chemistry, metabolome analysis and diagnosis of headaches. “If anyone has a chance to sort this out, it is this team,” they say.
It’s amazing what a relatively small donation can buy: $50 for supplies to prepare wine for analysis; $250 to purchase a selection of wines to be analyzed; $1,000 to analyze one batch of wine, and $5,000 to organize a survey of some red wine headache sufferers. The crowdfunding page is at https://crowdfund.ucdavis.edu/project/29940.
Your donation won’t get you a tee-shirt or a wineglass with the UC Davis logo. But it will get your name on UC Davis’s donor wall. It sounds like a worthy project. Hopefully donors will also get a thank you letter to support a tax deduction for their donation.