Have you ever wondered what happens to a painkiller, like ibuprofen, after you
swallow it? Medicine that slides down your throat can help treat a headache, a
sore back, or a throbbing sprained ankle. But how does it get where it needs to
go in the first place?
The answer is that it hitches a ride in your circulatory bloodstream, cycling
through your body in a race to do its job before it's snared by organs and
molecules designed to neutralize and expel foreign substances. This process
starts in your digestive system. Say you swallow an ibuprofen tablet for a sore
ankle.
Within minutes, the tablet starts disintegrating in the acidic fluids of your
stomach. The dissolved ibuprofen travels into the small intestine and then across
the intestinal wall into a network of blood vessels. These blood vessels feed into
a vein, which carries the blood, and anything in it, to the liver.
The next step is to make it through the liver. As the blood and the drug
molecules in it travel through liver blood vessels, enzymes attempt to react with
the ibuprofen molecules to neutralize them. The damaged ibuprofen molecules,
called metabolites, may no longer be effective as painkillers. At this stage, most
of the ibuprofen makes it through the liver unscathed.
It continues its journey out of the liver, through veins, into the body's circulatory
system. Half an hour after you swallow the pill, some of the dose has already
made it into the circulatory bloodstream. This blood loop travels through every
limb and organ, including the heart, brain, kidneys, and back through the liver.
When ibuprofen molecules encounter a location where the body's pain response
is in full swing, they bind to specific target molecules that are part of that
reaction. Painkillers, like ibuprofen, block the production of compounds that
help the body transmit pain signals. As more drug molecules accumulate, the
pain-canceling effect increases, reaching a maximum within about one or two
hours.
Then the body starts efficiently eliminating ibuprofen, with the blood dose
decreasing by half every two hours on average. When the ibuprofen molecules
detach from their targets, the systemic bloodstream carries them away again.
Back in the liver, another small fraction of the total amount of the drug gets
transformed into metabolites, which are eventually filtered out by the kidneys in
the urine.
The loop from liver to body to kidneys continues at a rate of about one blood
cycle per minute, with a little more of the drug neutralized and filtered out in
each cycle. These basic steps are the same for any drug that you take orally, but
the speed of the process and the amount of medicine that makes it into your
bloodstream vary based on the drug, the individual, and the method of ingestion.
The dosing instructions on medicine labels can help, but they're averages based
on a sample population that doesn't represent every consumer. And getting the
dose right is important. If it's too low, the medicine won't do its job. If it's too
high, the drug and its metabolites can be toxic.
That's true of any drug. One of the hardest groups of patients to get the right
dosage for is children. That's because how they process medicine changes
quickly, as do their bodies. For instance, the level of liver enzymes that
neutralize medication highly fluctuates during infancy and childhood. And that's
just one of many complicating factors.
Genetics, age, diet, disease, and even pregnancy influence the body's efficiency
in processing medicine. Someday, routine DNA tests may be able to dial in the
precise dose of medicine personalized to your liver efficiency and other factors,
but in the meantime, your best bet is reading the label or consulting your doctor
or pharmacist, and taking the recommended amounts at the recommended times.
