Your lifestyle choices decide how well a medication works for you, findings of a new study reveal. Researchers have found that unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking, alcohol use, and obesity can affect the way the body metabolizes a drug.
Researchers have known the potential impact of unhealthy lifestyle choices on enzyme levels, which in turn may influence drug metabolism.
Seeking a deeper understanding of this connection, researchers from Aarhus University’s Department of Forensic Medicine conducted tests on liver samples from 116 deceased individuals with mental illness. The objective was to understand the impact of lifestyle factors on the production of drug-metabolizing enzymes, with a notable portion of their study subjects being smokers, alcoholics, or obese.
“People suffering from severe mental illness have a life expectancy of about 20 years lower than the rest of the population. There are several reasons for this, for example, the mentally ill commit suicide more often. They also have an increased incidence of lifestyle-related factors such as diabetes, obesity, smoking, and alcohol or drug use,” said Kata Wolff Pedersen, the study author, in a news release.
“It’s exciting to see how lifestyle affects the amount of drug-metabolizing enzymes in the body, because a change in the amount of enzyme can reduce the efficacy of the drugs used by this group of patients,” she said.
The researchers found that smokers have double the levels of a specific drug-metabolizing enzyme CYP1A2 compared to non-smokers. Consequently, they metabolize drugs, including antipsychotic medications, at a faster rate, posing a higher risk of receiving incorrect treatment.
In the case of participants who used alcohol, the levels of the drug-metabolizing enzyme CYP2E1 were approximately 30% higher compared with people without known alcohol consumption.
“This means that standard doses of a drug may have a lower effect on a significant part of the group of people we’ve studied,”…
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