Unexpected Results of Paracetamol on Regulation of Sex Hormones
According to the latest study by scientists at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, use of painkiller acetaminophen (paracetamol) during pregnancy may cause harmful sex hormone abnormalities.
The study, highlighting the power of genomic and metabolomic profiling tries to better understand drug mechanisms of action and metabolism even in common drugs such as acetaminophen.
“This study reveals significant new opportunities for pharmaceutical research to better understand common medications and their effects on human health and patient safety,” said study first author Isaac Cohen, PharmD candidate in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego.
“Our research also emphasizes how the integration of genomics and metabolomics should enable better outcomes for clinical trials.”
The study was started out by observing 455 active adults over age 18 who were divided into two groups—a 208-person machine learning training set and a 247-person test set. As a validation set, the team included 1,880 European ancestry twins from the TwinsUK cohort and 1,235 individuals of African American and Hispanic ancestry from the Insulin Resistance Atherosclerosis Study. Metabolomic analysis of more than
700 metabolites was conducted by the company Metabolon, Inc.Through this analysis, the team was then able to identify depletion of sulfated sex hormones associated with acetaminophen use in all the study populations. The results showed that use of acetaminophen is roughly equivalent to 35 years of aging on sulfated hormone levels, which could affect placental health and general reproductive health.
While there are many factors that go into reproductive health, this new study identified an area of acetaminophen’s effects that weren’t previously known, offering some insight into previous studies suggesting that acetaminophen exposure during gestation may impact development of masculine and behavioral characteristics.
“These findings are significant for they showcase how the body is impacted by seemingly innocuous everyday medications like Tylenol,” said senior author Dr. Amalio Telenti, from J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of California San Diego.
“There are hundreds of other drugs that no one has done this research for. We delineate a general strategy that should be applied broadly in the study of medications in common use.”
