The views expressed in opinion pieces are strictly those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial staff.
Posted on June 12, 2022
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By Jacques Henry.
It is well known that dust in the eye amplifies the slightest annoyance to the point that one can become irascible. A little pain makes us more sensitive to emotions. It is the brain that controls our reactions and we must exercise great self-control to dominate our reactions. Besides, these emotions can be positive or negative, it depends. The emotional management center happens to be the limbic system. In other words, everything inside the cerebral cortex also handles pain, a signal most often coming from the brainstem because the brain itself is painless. It’s schematic and a specialist would say that I write nonsense. But if we go into the details, the brain being such a complex organ, we no longer understand anything. All this introduction to talk regarding paracetamol or acetaminophen, the most popular and best-selling painkiller in the world.
Paracetamol acts quite quickly on pain and its mode of action is, still schematically, supposed to stop the signals indicating pain going up from the brain stem to the brain but following being coupled with arachidonic acid, a modification which makes it more actively analgesic. And when we relieve pain, we also become less sensitive to negative emotions. If this seems logical, it is not the same for the other effect of paracetamol which also reduces positive emotions and… the perception of pleasure.
Hard to believe and yet a study published in the newspaper Psychological Science tends to prove that things happen that way. Does paracetamol therefore have several modes of action, one at the level of the transmission of the pain signal and the other at the level of the limbic system? And how to prove it or at least obtain some indications on these mechanisms? Simply by carrying out simple tests on a sufficient number of people to be certain that the end result is encouraging for further research.
Doctor Geoffrey Durso, a psychologist from the University of Ohio, therefore asked 82 students in good health and suffering from no pain to take 1 gram of paracetamol for half of them, and a tablet of placebo for the other half. An hour later, by the time the paracetamol was active as an arachidonic acid ester, the test involved showing each person a series of 40 photos chosen to elicit strong emotional reactions, like pictures of children dying of hunger or on the contrary healthy and happy and playing with their little cat. Students were asked to rank the photos from –5 for the most negative to +5 for the most emotionally positive. Then they were asked to review the photos once more and rank them once more from 1 to 10 according to their emotional level.
The members of the group who received paracetamol systematically rated the photos that aroused a disturbing emotion as less negative and the “happy” photos less positive, in a way a leveling of the emotions. It is certain that the differences between the placebo group and the paracetamol group were not immense, far from it, but the result clearly suggests that this chemical molecule also acts on the central nervous system. In other words, when you take good doses of paracetamol, you become zen and everything slips over you like water on a duck’s feathers. Notice to the emotional, but no excess either…
Article originally published on 23 avril 2015.
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