Pills dissolve faster in the stomach if you lean to the right

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Pills dissolve faster in the stomach if you lean to the right
Pills dissolve faster in the stomach if you lean to the right
Anonim

When a person takes a pill, it goes through a long and difficult path - first through the stomach, then into the intestines, and finally into the blood. But sometimes his stomach takes much longer to dissolve the medicine

The reason for this is the position of the body.

This discovery was made by scientists from Johns Hopkins University in the USA. They modeled the process of dissolving the pills in the human stomach and found that the ideal position for their faster absorption is not to sit upright, but to lean to the right, writes Science Alert.

“We were very surprised by the fact that body position had such a huge effect on the rate of drug dissolution,” says Rajat Mittal, who studies fluid dynamics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.- But now I will definitely think about it every time I have to take medicine.”

Oral medications are absorbed into the bloodstream through the intestines. They work more slowly than injections, but are much more convenient for home use. To enter the intestines, the tablets must first pass through the stomach and a so-called valve that opens and closes during digestion.

Even if you're not that concerned about how quickly your body absorbs vitamin supplements, it can be important when you're taking medications, as it affects both how quickly they work for pain and how they'll stabilize your blood pressure.

So Mittal and his colleagues tested four postures using a computer model of the human stomach created using high-quality scanned images of the body of a 34-year-old man.

The model, called StomachSim, simulates the biomechanics of a tablet's movement through the digestive tract, as well as the rate of its release from the stomach into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine where absorption of nutrients begins.

It turned out that taking the pills tilted to the right or lying on the right side led to the fact that the drugs fell into the deepest part of the computer stomach and "dissolved" twice as fast as the drugs taken in an upright position.

Leaning to the left or lying on the left side slows the dissolution, so it takes five times longer in this position than standing up.

“For older, inactive or bedridden people, turning to the left or right side is very important to the effect of their treatment,” explains Mittal.

To take it a step further, the scientists also modeled how absorption of the pills happens if someone has a condition called gastroparesis, in which damaged nerves or weakened muscles stop or delay the proper emptying of the stomach. They found that even slight reductions in the stomach's simulated digestive capacity led to noticeable differences in how quickly it digested and expelled the pill in the duodenum – similar to changes in posture.

“Body position itself has such a big impact that it's equivalent to someone's stomach suffering significant dysfunction in terms of dissolving the tablets,” says Dr. Mittal.

Of course, many processes also occur after drugs and food pass through the stomach, into the intestines, and finally into the blood. Let's also not forget that computer simulations are useful but very simplified models of the complex processes that occur in the living human organism.

The amount of liquid, gas and food in the stomach can also affect digestion, but scientists have not modeled these processes.

“Despite these and other limitations, we have shown that computer models and simulations of gastric fluid movement can provide useful and unique insight into the complex physiological processes underlying drug dissolution,” the scientists wrote.

The study was published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

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