In our daily life, it is inevitable that we will take some drugs for health reasons.
A common, economical and simple method of administration is oral, i.e. swallowing pills or capsules. What most people do is drink some water and then take some pills. But is it so easy to take medicine? Science has proved that running has the correct running posture, swimming also has the correct swimming posture. So, is there a correct posture for taking medicine? In other words, how can you take medicine to make the effect more effective?
A new study answers this question. The research team from Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins University School of medicine explored what posture humans should take when taking oral drugs and what they should eat before and after taking drugs. The study found that gravity has a great influence on the effect of taking medicine, that is, the posture after taking medicine can indeed affect the effect of stomach absorption of Medicine - lying on the left side can slow down the discharge speed of medicine, while lying on the right side is conducive to giving greater effect. Relevant research papers were published in the academic journal physics of fluids under the title of computational modeling of drug solution in the human society: effects of posture and gastroparesis on drug bioavailability.
According to the paper, this is the first model that combines gastric biomechanics with drug movement and dissolution to determine how many active drugs actually reach the duodenum through the pylorus.
In fact, oral administration is the most complex way for the human body to absorb active drug components, because the bioavailability of drugs in the gastrointestinal tract depends on the drug components and the dynamic physiological environment of the stomach. "Although oral administration is the most common choice for administration, its complexity is surprising," said Rajat Mittal, one of the authors of the paper, "When the drug reaches the stomach, the movement of the stomach wall and the flow of substances in the stomach determine its dissolution speed, and the properties of the drug and substances in the stomach also play an important role. However, the current research capacity of the experimental or clinical procedures for evaluating the dissolution of oral drugs is limited, which makes scientists unable to understand the effects of different stomach diseases on the dissolution and absorption of drugs. In this work, the research team adopted the real solution based on the stomach A biomimetic computer model was used to investigate and quantify the effects of body posture and gastric motility on drug bioavailability.
Figure | the original position of the stomach relative to the body and the relative position under different postures in this study
Stdies have shown that standing will allow more drugs to be quickly discharged from the stomach. While lying on the side, because the outlet of the stomach is at the highest point, lying on the left side can slow down the discharge speed of drugs, while lying on the right side is conducive to giving greater effect.
Figure | volume distribution of active drug ingredient concentration dissolved in antrum and duodenum in different postures
Of course, this study also has certain limitations. For example, due to the computational cost, the current simulation is limited to modeling the short duration of the dissolution process (about 3 minutes), which is very short considering that drug dissolution may occur within several hours. However, the researchers said that their model could generate biologically relevant data on drug dissolution, which could provide useful and unique insights into the complex physiological processes behind oral drugs. See here, next time after taking the medicine, may I try lying on the right side?
Reference link:
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0096877
Source:
https://www.cn-healthcare.com/articlewm/20220815/content-1418097.html
