Painkillers should be taken in one way for the quickest relief, scientists claim

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For those in search of swift relief from pain, reaching for paracetamol might seem like second nature, however, new research indicates that this approach might be dampening the pill's effectiveness.

Scientists have found that a person's body positioning can significantly impact the way painkillers work, with academics pinpointing the optimal method to take them—as well as what could potentially slow their efficacy.

According to experts from the US, resting on your right side could allow medications to work better, but flipping to the left could postpone that much-needed respite. The results obtained from the research, which were published in 2022 in the journal 'Physics of Fluids', came through the aid of a sophisticated biomimetic simulator known as "StomSim".

This device enabled the experts to explore just how the human body and drugs interact in intricate detail, with the dynamics proving to be quite complex, as noted by researchers, the Mirror reports.

The "StomSim" model has created a benchmark by integrating gastrointestinal biomechanics with pill movement and drug dissolution to measure the travel of an active pharmaceutical ingredient from the stomach through the pylorus and into the duodenum.

With this advance, researchers were able to ascertain and compare the rates at which the stomach empties and releases dissolved medication into the duodenum across various physiological conditions.

Professor Rajat Mittal—a co-author of the study from Johns Hopkins University—commented on the intricacies of taking medicine orally, remarking: "Oral administration is surprisingly complex despite being the most common choice for drug administration.

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"When the pill reaches the stomach, the motion of the stomach walls and the flow of contents inside determine the rate at which it dissolves. The properties of the pill and the stomach contents also play a major role.

"However, current experimental or clinical procedures for assessing the dissolution of oral drugs are limited in their ability to study this, which makes it a challenge to understand how the dissolution is affected in different stomach disorders, such as gastroparesis, which slows down the emptying of the stomach."

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He highlighted that the stomach's contents and gastric fluid dynamics are among factors that influence a drug's bioavailability, and stomach contractions can induce pressure and generate complex pill trajectories.

Prof Mittal stated: "This results in varying rates of pill dissolution and non-uniform emptying of the drug into the duodenum and, sometimes, gastric dumping in the case of modified-release dosage. Together, these issues pose several challenges for the design of drug delivery."

Prof Mittal further added: "In this work, we demonstrate a novel computer simulation platform that offers the potential for overcoming these limitations.

"Our models can generate biorelevant data on drug dissolution that can provide useful and unique insights into the complex physiological processes behind the oral administration of pills."

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