Submitted by Chairman_Mittens t3_y96dfg in askscience
[deleted] t1_it4uoam wrote
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byllz t1_it56upi wrote
I thought alcohol caused the burning feeling because it was a TRPV1 agonist, the same as capsaicin, not because of any cellular damage.
Jaedos t1_it5blil wrote
That... is a whole new realm of reading I'll have to do. It looks like there's both epithelial non-neuronal, and neuronal presentations of the protein, but I can't tell if the epithelial activation results in a brain-aware pain signal, or simply impacts the local biology such as increasing glandular activity, etc.
You are absolutely correct that ethanol is considered a strong agonist for TRPV1 though. I'll have to add an edit about the specifics of the burning sensation and read up some more on this.
[deleted] t1_it58fbf wrote
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EmptyKnowledge9314 t1_it53fc1 wrote
Thank you that was educational and fun!
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