September 16, 2022 – I want to tell you a story about forgetfulness and haste and how their combination can lead to frightening consequences. A few years ago, I was lying in bed about to turn off the light when I realized I had forgotten to take the ‘pill’.
Like about 161 million American adults, I was then a prescription consumer Drugs. Being conscientious, I got up and retrieved said pill and tossed it again. Being lazy, I didn’t bother to grab a glass of water to help the thing go down. Instead, I immediately went back to bed, threw a pillow over my head, and got ready for bed.
Within seconds, I started feeling a burning sensation in my chest. After about a minute, this burn turned into severe pain. Not wanting to alert my wife, I went to the living room, where I spent the next 30 minutes compounding the pain. did i have Heart attack? I called my sister, a hospital doctor in Texas. She advised me to take myself to the emergency room for an examination.
If only I knew then about Duke. He could tell me how dangerous the body situation is when people swallow pills.
Who is the Duke?
Duke is a computer representation of a 34-year-old anatomically normal humanoid created by computer scientists at IT’IS Foundation, a Swiss-based non-profit group engaged in a variety of projects in the field of healthcare technology. using duke, Rajat MittalMD, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, created a computer model called “StomachSim” to explore the digestive process.
Their research published in the journal fluid physicsAnd the He revealed many surprising results about the dynamics of ingestion of pills – the most common method of drug use worldwide.
Mittal says he chose to study the stomach because the functions of most other organ systems, from the heart to the brain, had already attracted a lot of scientists’ interest.
“While I was looking to begin researching some new directions, the implications for stomach biomechanics on important conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and gastroparesis It became clear to me,” he says. “It was clear that bioengineering research in this area lags behind other ‘exciting’ areas such as cardiovascular flows by at least 20 years, and there appears to be a significant opportunity to do impactful work.”
It may help your birth control pill work better
Several things are known to affect the ability of the contraceptive pill to break up its contents in the intestines and be used by the body, such as stomach contents (a heavy breakfast, a mixture of liquids such as juice, milk and coffee) and the movement of the walls of the organ. But Metal Group learned that Duke’s posture also played a major role.
The researchers ran Duke through computer simulations in different positions: upright, tilted right, tilted left, and tilted back, keeping all other parts of their analyzes (like the things mentioned above) the same.
They found that the situation determines up to 83% of the speed at which the contraceptive pill spreads in the intestine. The most efficient position was leaning to the right. Least tilted to the left, which prevented the pill from reaching the antrum, or lower part of the stomach, and thus kept all traces of the dissolved drug from entering the duodenum, where the stomach meets the small intestine. (Interestingly, Jews who celebrate Passover advise to do so. Lean left During the meal as a symbol of freedom and entertainment.)
This makes sense if you think about the shape of the stomach, which is kind of like a bean, bending from the left to the right side of the body. Because of gravity, your position will change from where the pill landed.
In the end, researchers found that posture could be an important factor in how well birth control pills dissolve like gastroparesis, a condition in which the stomach loses the ability to empty properly.
How can this help people
Among the groups most likely to benefit from such studies, Mittal says, are older adults — who eat a lot of pills and are more likely to have problems swallowing because of age-related changes in their lives. esophagus And the bedridden, who cannot change their position easily. The results may also lead to improvements in ability to do so Treating people with gastroparesisA special problem for diabetics.
Future studies with Duke and similar simulations will look at how the GI system digests proteins, carbohydrates and fatty meals, Mittal says.
In the meantime, Mittal offers the following advice: “Stand or sit up straight after taking a pill. If you have to take a pill lying down, stay on your back or on your right side. Avoid lying on your left side after taking the pill.”
As for what happened to me, any gastroenterologist who read this found out that my condition was not heart related. Instead, it’s possible that I was having a seizure Esophagitis pillsIrritation can result from medications that aggravate the mucous membrane of the food pipe. Although esophagitis is painful, it is not life-threatening. After about an hour, the pain began to subside, and by the next morning I was fine, and I only had a faint ache in my chest to remind me of my previous torment. (The researchers noted an increase in the case early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Associated with the antibiotic doxycycline.)
And to be precise, the pill problem began above stomach. Nothing in Hopkins’ research indicates that the alignment of the esophagus plays a role in how drugs diffuse into the gut — unless, of course, those pills are prevented from reaching the stomach in the first place.
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