Why do drugs so drastically affect one person versus another? One person can take a sip of alcohol once and be an alcoholic for life. One person can take OTC narcotics and have almost no effect, while another person takes the same drug and knocked out for hours. Why are there such vast differences when for the most part, our biology is so similar?
In: Chemistry
Many drug interactions are actually due to a change in a third player. Drugs are broken down in the body. Whatever chemical is responsible for breaking it down can also be affected by the drug or by another drug. Let’s say drug A is broken down by chemical B, but you are also taking drug C, which has a side effect of making chemical B work a lot faster. Since chemical B is working faster, drug A is broken down very quickly, so drug A isn’t working very well in your body.
You can also have where drug C could make chemical B work very slowly, so the amount of drug A in your body can get to be very high (since your body isn’t getting rid of the drug fast enough) and you can then experience a lot of drug A’s side effects.
Sometimes a drug can be broken down into a toxic chemical, but normally it’s broken down at a rate where it’s still safe. Having an interaction where the drug is broken down into the toxic chemical very quickly can be poisonous.
Bonus: some drugs that you take are not active until they are broken down in the body, so you can have the opposite relationship where a lot of breaking down actually gives a lot of drug A side effects and slow breakdown makes it so the drug doesn’t work.
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