Magnesium dietary supplements may be capable to blunt a well known facet impact of the painkiller acetaminophen, new analysis suggests. The research discovered proof in lab animals that oral magnesium can forestall acetaminophen-related liver injury by affecting the intestine microbiome. Extra analysis might be wanted to substantiate this potential protecting profit, nonetheless.
Acetaminophen, both taken alone or together with different medication, is without doubt one of the most generally used drugs on this planet. Offered generically and below the favored model identify Tylenol, it may well alleviate fever and gentle to average ache. However an excessive amount of acetaminophen over a brief time frame may cause acute and even life-threatening liver harm. It’s regarded as the main reason for acute liver failure within the U.S, with an estimated 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths attributed yearly to the drug, in accordance with a 2005 research.
The drug’s dangerous liver results come from how the drug is metabolized by the physique. The first wrongdoer seems to be an enzyme known as CYP2E1, which breaks acetaminophen down into byproducts that may be poisonous to the liver in excessive sufficient ranges. So discovering a strategy to safely inhibit CYP2E1 exercise whereas taking acetaminophen may enable us to forestall overdoses and even enable the drug to be extra helpful than it already is.
In a research revealed Monday in Cell Host and Microbe, scientists in China and California describe how magnesium may do the trick.
Magnesium performs an essential function in protecting many components of the physique wholesome, together with our coronary heart—typically by influencing lots of of various enzymes. The researchers theorized that magnesium may also work together in essential methods with the intestine microbiome, the group of normally innocent or useful micro organism and different microbes that reside alongside our digestive tract. The researchers performed experiments with mice, pigs, and people to check out their speculation. In a single experiment, for example, the crew seeded the center of mice with the microbiomes of people that took magnesium dietary supplements, then gave the mice excessive doses of acetaminophen.
Throughout these assessments, the crew discovered proof that magnesium can forestall acetaminophen-related liver injury by inducing metabolic modifications within the intestine microbiome. Particularly, oral magnesium appeared to stimulate the metabolism of intestine micro organism known as Bifidobacterium, resulting in elevated ranges of a compound known as indole-3-carboxylic acid (I3C), which then certain to and inactivated CYP2E1.
“We offer a priceless strategy, oral magnesium consumption, as a probably secure and efficient technique to forestall CYP2E1-mediated [acute liver failure],” the authors wrote.
The findings are largely restricted to animals, so that they’re not proof that folks can simply take magnesium dietary supplements to maintain themselves secure from a possible acetaminophen overdose. And it’s too early to know if its protecting impact may very well be simply utilized to everybody, since totally different individuals and their microbiomes may reply in numerous methods to magnesium.
However the outcomes do supply some intriguing new avenues for analysis, the crew says. Discovering a strategy to increase ranges of Bifidobacterium or I3C even with out magnesium may assist forestall acute liver harm from acetaminophen, for example. And since CYP2E1 can also be regarded as concerned in different kinds of liver failure, such therapies may have extra purposes past making acetaminophen safer.
In any case, the authors say that “extra experiments with an expanded spectrum of human topics are required sooner or later.”