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Sydney: Always avoid
alcohol while taking certain medicines because it actually triples
the original dose, warn researchers.
Lab experiments have demonstrated how alcohol made several drugs
up to three times more available to the body, effectively tripling
the original dose, said Christel Bergstrom, associate professor of
pharmacology at Monash University, who led the study.
Bergstrom and colleagues explain that beverage alcohol, or
ethanol, can cause an increase in the amount of non-prescription
and prescription drugs that are "available" to the body after
taking a specific dose, the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics
reports.
Alcohol can change how enzymes and other substances in the body
interact with many of the 5,000 such medications on the market.
Some of these medications don't dissolve well in the
gastrointestinal tract, especially in the stomach and intestines,
according to a Monash statement.
The researchers sought to test whether ethanol made these drugs
dissolve more easily. If so, this would make the drugs more
"available" in the body, possibly intensifying their effects when
combined with alcohol.
They used a simulated environment of the small intestine to test
how rapidly medications dissolved when alcohol was and was not
present. Almost 60 percent of the 22 medications in their tests
dissolved much faster in the presence of alcohol.
In addition, they found that certain types of substances, such as
those that were acidic, were more affected. Some common acidic
drugs include warfarin, the anticoagulant; tamoxifen, used to
treat certain forms of cancer; and naproxen, which relieves pain
and inflammation.
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