When you are in pain, its natural to do everything you can to alleviate it quickly. But rushing to pop painkillers might not be the best way to get relief, according to experts. American scientists have found that your posture could affect how fast the stomach absorbs drugs taken orally.
As such, you will likely want to adjust the way you are positioned, when hoping for some much-needed pain relief. Research suggests it is more effective to lie on your right side when taking medication. But don't turn the other way, or you could risk waiting longer for relief, according to the findings published in the journal Physics of Fluids.
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Scientists used a state of the art biomimetic simulator – dubbed a "StomachSim" – for the study.
They said the modelling is believed to be the first of its kind to couple gastric biomechanics with pill movement and drug dissolution to quantify an active pharmaceutical ingredient passing through the pylorus into the duodenum.
It enabled the researchers to calculate and compare the emptying rate and the release of a dissolved active pharmaceutical ingredient into the duodenum for a variety of physiological situations.
Study co-author Professor Rajat Mittal, of Johns Hopkins University, said: "Oral administration is surprisingly complex despite being the most common choice for drug administration.
"When the pill reaches the stomach, the motion of the stomach walls and the flow of contents inside determine the rate at which it dissolves. The properties of the pill and the stomach contents also play a major role.
"However, current experimental or clinical procedures for assessing the dissolution of oral drugs are limited in their ability to study this, which makes it a challenge to understand how the dissolution is affected in different stomach disorders, such as gastroparesis, which slows down the emptying of the stomach."
He said the stomach's contents and gastric fluid dynamics are among factors that play a role in a drug's bioavailability, and stomach contractions can induce pressure and generate complex pill trajectories.
Prof Mittal said: "This results in varying rates of pill dissolution and non-uniform emptying of the drug into the duodenum and, sometimes, gastric dumping in the case of modified-release dosage.
"Together, these issues pose several challenges for the design of drug delivery."
Prof Mittal added: "In this work, we demonstrate a novel computer simulation platform that offers the potential for overcoming these limitations.
"Our models can generate biorelevant data on drug dissolution that can provide useful and unique insights into the complex physiological processes behind the oral administration of pills."
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